Data shows when Tom Brady plays, advertisers benefit

Kevin Krim, EDO CEO & President, joins Yahoo Finance to discuss the advertising research his company is calling the "Tom Brady Effect."

Video Transcript

- The biggest showdown the NFL has seen in quite some time, Tom Brady returning to Gillette Stadium. Last night it was the highest rated Sunday Night Football game so far this season, more than 22 million viewers.

Let's talk about what people are talking or what people are calling the Tom Brady Effect and the return that brands see when airing advertisements during his game or when they team up directly with the NFL star.

So we want to bring in Kevin Krim. He is the CEO and President of EDO, which is a data and analytics company. Kevin, it's good to see you. So Brady has certainly played in a number of high-profile games. I think, we all know that very clearly.

But just talk to us just about the Tom Brady Effect. That's what you guys are calling this and the return that brands and advertisers see when they do decide to advertise during his game.

KEVIN KRIM: Yeah, thanks for having me on. The Tom Brady effect is very real. To step back for a second, my company EDO, we measure the effect advertising has on changes in consumer behavior. So if a consumer sees an ad, what do they do? And what we find is that search, what they search for on places like Google is one of the most powerful signals of advertising impact available out there.

When people search for things, they're looking to buy those things often. And so what we do is measure every ad on TV and its effect on changes in search for every single area. And what we've seen over the last 6 and 1/2 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.

So the NFL, overall, is one of the most powerful franchises on television. They dominate the top programming in terms of measuring the efficacy of the ads, the impact on ads. When someone sees an ad for Tom Brady or sees an ad in a game that features Tom Brady, they are 15% more likely to engage in the ads that are seen in those games.

That's over 6,600 ads that we've seen that feature in games that Tom Brady is playing in. That's how long he's been playing. He's had a huge impact.

- Kevin.

KEVIN KRIM: When he's in the play-offs, he's 49% more likely to engage viewers with the ads in his games.

- Kevin, translate that into dollars for us. I mean, "CBS", "NBC", "FOX", when they get to sell a game knowing Tom Brady's in it, do they jack up the price? Who makes money on this and how do they make that money?

KEVIN KRIM: They don't necessarily jack up the price just for a Tom Brady game. What they do is they are clamoring with the NFL to get more Brady games in prime time. Prime time NFL games are the most effective places on television to advertise, save the Super Bowl, of course, and he's been in many of those. And so what they're doing is trying to get as many games as possible featuring Tom in their schedule.

- Kevin, what did you see from last night? I know you sent over some of the top 10 ads during the Sunday Night Football game. Sleep Number was number one, Subway was number two, Toyota was number three. Just exactly how many people did these ads, did these brands reach during the game?

KEVIN KRIM: And number four, by the way, was FTX Crypto, the brand that Tom Brady has been promoting for crypto trading. So Tom was featured in the Subway ad. It's a great ad, really funny. If you saw it last night, you know what I mean. It's like a perfume ad, but he's smelling the footlong bread that he notoriously does not eat. He doesn't eat bread to stay fit.

So it's a joke on that, and it really does speak to the power of the fresh bread at Subway restaurants. It's a great ad for Subway. It was the number two ad in the whole game. It generated over 117,000 searches in the minutes following that ad for subway. Whether that's subliminal or explicit, but people saw that ad and wanted to get the Subway app or wanted to think about getting some Subway sandwiches.

So, you know, that's the power of Tom Brady. The FTX Crypto ad that he was in that was the number four most popular ad. So he was in two of the top five most effective ads last night. That generated over 104,000 searches for FTX Crypto in the minutes following those ads. So he is an incredibly powerful franchise into himself.

- And, I think, all of us understand the value added simply from, if you're the TV network wanting that prime time exposure, if the advertiser reinforcing the decision you made. But help us, help me connect the disconnect here. If you're not making additional revenue based on this tremendous football players ability to do what he's doing with search engine, what good is it?

KEVIN KRIM: Well, the networks that are selling these ads, they know how powerful: A, the NFL is. B, the stars the NFL, like Tom Brady-- by the way, the number one ad, that Sleep Number ad last night featured Dax, Dax Prescott of the Dallas Cowboys. So quarterback stars matter, especially in context.

And so what the networks do when they're selling these ad packages is they use the value of these premium prime time 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 billions of dollars in the upfronts each year, even though we all know that convergent TV is changing. That viewers are seeing more options, the audience is fragmenting. So the value of that highly-engaged, very large audience that's watching the NFL is even more valuable in that kind of environment that's fragmenting.

- Kevin, is there any other player that's anywhere close to Tom Brady just in terms of fan engagement and impressions when it comes to ads?

KEVIN KRIM: Not in our data, except for, perhaps LeBron James, who we saw had a distinct effect very similar to Brady's, about 12% to 15% in the games that he participated in, especially in the play-offs for the NBA. So when the Lakers lost early in the play-offs this past play-off season, that was negative news for overall ad engagement in the NBA playoffs, which are, by the way, the second best franchise, overall, behind the NFL on television.

- Kevin Krim, great to see you here. CEO and President of EDO. Thanks so much for taking the time to join.