Over the course of Tom Brady s 22-year career, the NFL's least popular quarterback has bolstered the reputation of lesser-known players and coaches, his own brand TB12 and most recently the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after winning a Super Bowl championship during his first season with the franchise.
They don t have to be directly on Brady s team to profit from the future Hall of Famer. New data from EDO, which measures consumer engagement with advertising, shows that companies that advertise during Brady's games are also reaping the benefits of his star power.
The Tom Brady effect is very real, Kevin Krim, CEO and president of EDO, said on Yahoo Finance Live video above What we've seen over the last six-and-a-half years is that Tom Brady has a huge impact when he's in a game, and the effect on advertising in those games is elevated. The benefits of advertising during Brady games start with audience size.
Nationally televised games like the Philadelphia Eagles' upcoming Thursday night football matchup with the Buccaneers draw a substantial number of viewers. Today's Brady game against the New England PatriotsEngland Patriots was NBC s second most watched Sunday Night Football matchup since November 2002. This wasn t just because Brady showed up in New England as a return home for Brady, who played his first 20 NFL seasons in New England. EDO reported that a regular season game which features Brady averages a 12% larger viewing audience than other games.
And it's not just that viewers are more engaged for Brady's games — viewers also appear to be larger. In fact, consumers were 15% more likely to search brands that advertised during Brady games according to EDO.
Search, what people search on sites like Google, is one of the most powerful signals of advertising impact available out there, Krim explained. People on the Internet search for things and often get those things. And so what I do is measure every single ad in television and its effect on changes in search for every single area. On Sept. 9 Brady opened the NFL season in primetime broadcasting hours during primetime time. A Subway Commercial, which featured the notoriously health-conscious Brady smelling a loaf of Subway bread, drove 141,000 additional online searches for Subway per EDO. To put that perspective, viewers of the recent Brady ad were 68% more likely to search for Subway online than a viewer of average Subway commercial over the past six years.
According to EDO data, Brady augmented this engagement with his ad appearance. The quarterback featured in two of the four advertisements that drove more than 100,000 searches during the Bucs game against the Patriots.
Quarterbacks and stars matter, Krim said. What the networks do when they are selling these ad packages is they use the value of these premium primetime NFL games, with these stars as the anchor, as the centerpiece of a bigger buy. And this is the way that they generate tens of billion dollars each year in upfronts.