​Sports on TV keeps growing — and brands are still figuring out ways to maximize their investment. It’s live TV, meaning premium video. So that’s a good thing. But dialing in granular
results for brands throughout a typical sports broadcast can be tough.For example, looking at overall specific sports over a broad range of games/matches/programs, emotional engagement drops
significantly during the course of any event, according to a CIMM report just released, via
Mediaprobe.For U.S. football (pro or college) — the overall average engagement for all live content sinks throughout the duration of an event — from an 100 index (at the start of the game)
to 94 (after 60 minutes) and then to 86 (after 120 minutes). NBA and college basketball, baseball and soccer come in at similar levels.At the same time, the good news is that overall
“attention” scores are much higher with live sports versus all streaming programming. In an August 2025 study, Tvision says the WNBA has a leading 127 attention index. This is followed by Major League
Baseball follows with 120, Nascar at 114 and the NFL at 109.This is in comparison to an overall streaming programming average index of 92.CIMM says: “Live sports audiences
fluctuate substantially throughout broadcasts depending on game competitiveness, score margin, timing, narrative tension, and other contextual factors.”The bottom line is that this
shift to growing sports is now boosting global sports sponsorship to extremely high levels. Global sports sponsorship is estimated to climb more than $150 billion by 2032 from around $73.8 billion in
2022.CIMM says more positive news is that: “Increasingly, large platforms involved in sports distribution also possess substantial first-party transaction and shopping datasets. This
creates the possibility of linking sports advertising exposure directly to retail outcomes within closed-loop measurement systems.”But the system is not perfect. For the top level NFL
brands, four of the top five more active 2024 regular-season NFL advertisers witnessed their spot-level impressions underdeliver versus their average commercial minute audience results by a total of
381 million, according to iSpot.”If audience attention and engagement vary materially throughout live sports broadcasts, then not all impressions may carry equivalent
economics.”CIMM recommends that new pricing frameworks may need to start up. In football terms, it means that brands, like quarterbacks, need to complete a difficult no-room for-error
pass. It’s call “threading a needle” or “throwing a dime.”Big scores await.