Brands Must Adapt to Shifting Viewer Attention in Live Sports Broadcasts

According to a recently released CIMM analysis, viewer engagement declines noticeably throughout live sports broadcasts, dropping from a 100 index at the start of U.S. football games to 86 after two hours, with comparable patterns in basketball, baseball and soccer. Despite this dip, live sports maintain superior attention metrics compared with streaming programs, as an August 2025 Tvision study shows the WNBA achieving a 127 attention index, followed by MLB at 120, NASCAR at 114 and the NFL at 109, versus a 92 average for streaming.

The report notes that global sports sponsorship is expected to climb from $73.8 billion in 2022 to more than $150 billion by 2032. It also highlights that major sports distribution platforms now possess extensive first-party transaction and shopping data, creating opportunities for closed-loop measurement linking ad exposure to retail results, though current systems are still flawed. For top NFL advertisers, spot-level impressions fell short of average commercial minute audience figures by 381 million, underscoring the uneven value of impressions. CIMM recommends adopting new pricing frameworks that account for the variable attention, describing the needed precision as akin to a quarterback’s “throwing a dime.”