One week through its new season, there’s a lot of negative noise around the National Football League.
In July, Boston University came out with a study that found brain damage in the brains of 110 of 111 deceased NFL players; a federal judge blocked the NFL’s six-game suspension of Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott over domestic violence; and the list keeps growing of NFL players sitting or kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality, following the lead of Colin Kaepernick.
But make no mistake: none of this poses any real danger to the NFL’s revenue, because none of this is enough to make any official league sponsor walk away.
“Football is football,” says Elizabeth Lindsey, a managing partner at LA-based sports marketing firm Wasserman, who advises brands that sponsor the NFL. “We have a saying in our office: ‘A billion eyeballs is a billion eyeballs.’ It’ll always continue to garner attention from the marketers, primarily because it garners that much attention from the fans.”
[Lindsey is the special guest on Episode 2 of Yahoo Finance’s new Sportsbook podcast on the business of football. You can listen here or scroll to the bottom of this post.]
The “billion eyeballs” figure could be a stretch, but not by much. It’s a popular ballpark figure for the number of people that watch any football at all every season. (111 million people watched Super Bowl 51; regular season Sunday Night Football games average 20 million viewers; playoff games average more than 35 million viewers; tens of millions of people watch on streaming services; experts toss it all together and call it a billion.)
The NFL “is a phenomenon, a juggernaut,” Lindsey says.
The league’s “official” sponsors—the partners that pay more than $1.5 billion combined per season to be at the league’s highest level of association—agree.
It’s a list that includes, this season: Anheuser-Busch InBev; Barclays; Bose; Bridgestone; Campbell’s; Castrol; Dannon; DMI; EA Sports; Extreme Networks; FedEx; Ford; Frito-Lay (PepsiCo-owned); Gatorade (PepsiCo-owned); Hyundai; Intel; Marriott; Mars; McDonald’s; Microsoft; Nationwide; New Era; News America; Nike; Papa John’s; PepsiCo; Procter & Gamble; Quaker; Sirius XM; Ticketmaster; Under Armour; USAA; Verizon; Visa; and Zebra. Of those, Lindsey works closely with Microsoft, Nationwide, and Pepsi.
That’s not to say that NFL sponsors need not monitor news, and adapt to recent change. They must, and Lindsey acknowledges that in some ways, they aren’t.
One example: the shift in television consumption habits should lead sponsors to rethink the way they advertise to football fans. But “it’s not changing it as much as it should,” Lindsey says. “The ones who are paying attention—and I can’t say all of them are—but the ones who are paying attention as well as they should, they begin to realize: fans’ passion for the NFL is not going anywhere, but fans’ consumption habits of how they choose to watch the NFL is going everywhere. It’s all over the map.” (Tech companies, unsurprisingly, are “very well aware of it,” she says; business-to-business firms, or other consumer-facing brands, have been slower to innovate.)