By Murry Woronoff, Director of Research at Adtaxi
Every year, brands invest billions to align themselves with the world’s biggest sports moments, from the Super Bowl to the Winter Olympics, the FIFA World Cup, and the NBA Finals. The promise is scale. Emotion. Cultural relevance.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth revealed by consumer research: while 43% of consumers say ads prompt them to learn more about a brand or visit its website, just 1% say those ads lead directly to an immediate purchase. That gap isn’t a failure of sports advertising. It’s the reality of modern consumer behavior, and exactly where smarter marketers separate themselves from everyone else.
Awareness Isn’t the Problem, Follow-Through Is
Sports advertising excels at what it’s designed to do: capture attention at scale. Live sports remain one of the few environments where brands can still reach massive audiences simultaneously, wrapped in emotion, ritual, and shared experience. Other than the Apollo 11 moon landing, the Super Bowl dominates the top-10 list of most-watched TV programs. NBC reported an average viewing audience of 125M across its platforms for Super Bowl 50.
But live viewing is also chaotic. People are eating, talking, betting, scrolling, group-chatting, and multitasking across multiple screens. Measurement leaders like Nielsen now formally account for co-viewing because multiple people often share a single screen—making immediate, person-level attribution increasingly difficult.
In other words, the moment you pay for is rarely the moment someone buys. That doesn’t weaken sports advertising. It changes its role. Sports is no longer a conversion channel. It’s a demand-creation engine.
The Industry Already Knows This; Look at the Super Bowl
Recent Super Bowls offer a clear signal of how advertiser expectations have shifted. Increasingly, brands are using pre-game stunts, cultural misdirection, and “pranks” to spark speculation and conversation before the ad ever airs. As documented by Adweek, these efforts are not gimmicks—they’re strategic extensions of the media plan, designed to generate search behavior, social chatter, and earned media that can be captured and retargeted.
In effect, advertisers aren’t buying a single in-game moment. They’re engineering weeks of attention that make follow-up media work harder. That behavior reinforces a critical truth: sports advertising is built to ignite interest rather than to close the sale in isolation.
The New Reality: Sports Starts the Journey, It Doesn’t Finish It
Today’s consumers don’t move from ad exposure to checkout in one step. They move through a series of quick touchpoints:
● Curiosity
● Research
● Comparison
● Validation
● Timing
● Purchase
Our latest research at Adtaxi confirms this pattern. Nearly half of viewers lean in, but only a fraction transact immediately. Which means the real ROI of sports media lives downstream.
Savvy advertisers now treat marquee sports moments as the opening chapter of a longer customer journey. But of course there’s more to the story.
From Spectacle to Strategy: Designing the Second Act
High-performing sports advertisers think in phases—not placements.
Phase 1: The Moment (Awareness) This is where sports shine: high-impact creative, fame-building storytelling, emotion, humor, celebrity, spectacle. The objective here isn’t conversion, it’s to invoke a memory. This is the spark.
Phase 2: The Explanation (Consideration) Once curiosity is triggered, follow-up media must answer key questions quickly:
● What is this?
● Why does it matter?
● How does it fit my life?
Short-form video, social, and display take over here—delivering clarity, benefits, and proof points like reviews or demonstrations. Reusing your primary Super Bowl spot at this stage is a mistake. This phase needs utility, not grandstanding.
Phase 3: The Activation (Conversion) Now comes the ask. Offers, availability, store locators, product pages, and retail media move center stage. Creative shifts from inspiration to instruction:
● Buy now
● Find it near you
● Limited availability
● Ships tomorrow
Different message. Different mindset.
Phase 4: The Reinforcement (Loyalty) Post-purchase is where lifetime value begins. Set up tips. Accessories. Subscription reminders. Community content. This phase transforms first-time buyers into repeat customers.
Retargeting: Where the 43% Becomes Revenue
That 43% isn’t just a statistic—it’s a pipeline. Consumers raise their hands through behaviors like:
● Website visits
● Video completions
● Social engagement
● Product page views
● Store locator searches
These are intent signals.
Sophisticated brands build retargeting strategies around them—prioritizing recency and relevance while suppressing recent converters and chronic non-responders to protect frequency and brand equity. They stop asking, Did my Super Bowl ad convert? And start asking, How efficiently did it fuel my retargeting efforts? That shift in thinking changes everything.
Second Screens Aren’t Distractions—They’re Conversion Channels
Sports audiences don’t just watch anymore. They participate.
Phones and laptops light up during games with searches, texts, social posts, and shopping behavior. That’s why QR codes, shoppable formats, and mobile-first creative are becoming standard in live sports environments. But second-screen experiences must be fast, useful, and frictionless. If the landing page loads slowly, the offer is unclear, or the next step feels complicated, the moment is gone. Sports create urgency. Follow-up experiences must honor it.
Cross-Channel Handoffs Are the New Media Playbook
Winning brands don’t treat channels as silos. They design handoffs. A high-performing sports flow typically looks like this:
● CTV creates emotional reach
● Paid search captures active intent
● Social reinforces messaging and social proof
● Retail media accelerates conversion near the shelf
● Email or SMS (when opted-in) drives repeat engagement
The Interactive Advertising Bureau has been clear: modern performance depends on integrated, cross-channel measurement and planning—not isolated metrics.
Sports advertising works best when tightly connected to search, social, retail media, and CRM—never evaluated in isolation.
The Thought-Leader Takeaway
Sports advertising doesn’t drive instant purchases. It drives interest. And interest is incredibly valuable if you know what to do with it. The brands outperforming in today’s sports economy don’t expect one ad to do everything. They build systems:
● Sports create awareness
● Retargeting captures intent
● Cross-channel sequencing provides clarity
● Retail media accelerates conversion
● CRM builds lifetime value
They design for the journey, not the moment.
So the real question isn’t whether these ads work. It’s whether you’ve built the digital infrastructure to turn that 43% into customers. Because in modern sports advertising, the initial impression is just the start. The real results happen in the follow-through.
Murry Woronoff is the Director of Research at digital marketing agnecy Adtaxi.
