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The National Football League is dividing sponsorships into narrower categories and bringing more brands to the game, but Toyota wants automotive all to itself.
The automaker just announced a multiyear sponsorship agreement with the NFL that gives it broad access to the league’s branding and symbols—as well as its roughly 205 million fans. The league hasn’t had an exclusive automobile sponsor since its deal with Hyundai reached the end of the road in 2019, and has since cleaved vehicle sponsorship into smaller categories (Ford’s F-150 was a truck sponsor for a time) and team-by-team arrangements.
Toyota is familiar with this particular game. During the ‘80s, it was content with sponsoring the Toyota Halftime Show during ABC’s Monday Night Football. Since 2006, it’s been the halftime sponsor of NBC’s Sunday Night Football.
So why make such a large investment now and consolidate the NFL’s automotive category when the league is packing as many brands into alcohol, tech, gaming and other segments as possible?
“We felt that we wanted to do fewer sponsorships better,” said David Christ, Toyota’s group vice president and general manager. “So we really go after sponsorships, and we try to make them mutually beneficial.”
Through its local dealerships, Toyota also sponsors 11 of the NFL’s 32 teams, with San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy touting Toyota in the Bay Area and retired New York Giants two-time Super Bowl winner Eli Manning pitching Toyota to his metro area for nearly two decades. After the NFL spent several years dividing its automotive sponsorship into truck, SUV and other categories, Toyota argued for the merits of a line that spans its bZ4X electric vehicle and its Sequoia and Tundra trucks.
In return, Toyota receives rights to NFL logos and marks like the league shield, access to game footage and players in uniform (with help from the players’ union) and favored access to NFL general-market and digital media. Christ also noted that Toyota benefits from the league’s diversity and inclusion efforts, which have reached out to audiences of color and women—with the latter comprising 46% of all NFL fans, according to SSRS Sports Poll.
Through its Sunday Night Football sponsorship, Toyota has also witnessed firsthand some of the other benefits of mingling its brand with the NFL’s. According to data and analytics firm EDO, half of the top 10 most effective broadcasts for advertisers in 2022 were NFL games. Viewers of opening week’s Sunday Night Football on NBC were 24% more likely to engage online with ads than they would during average primetime viewing. A brand would need 13 ads during a typical network primetime broadcast to match one ad from that week’s Sunday Night Football.
