The NFL isn’t dumb when it comes to making money. And it knows the Taylor Swift crossover has been a boon.
The NFL has seen ticket prices and television ratings go up for the couple of games Swift has attended. She is in a relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. Stodgy fans who take the NFL too seriously complain about how much Swift is being shown — even Kelce himself wonders if the NFL is overdoing it — but there’s a large audience that wants more Swift.
The NFL is all-in on the wave, to the point the league reportedly asked its television partners to show ads for Swift’s movie about her Eras Tour for free, according to Andrew Marchand of the New York Post. Marchand reported that ESPN and NBC did so, showing the ads during their pregame shows this past week. There was also a Swift ad shown during the NBC game between the New York Jets and Chiefs, which Swift attended.
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Conspiracy theorists will have more fuel, but it’s just good business. From both sides.
The NFL is getting a bump from aligning with Swift. It’s attracting a larger audience, apparently tapping into the massive amount of Swift fans around the world. The NFL thinks it’s a big deal, and it is, but it probably got a wake-up call when it compared itself to the reach of Swiftie nation.
Swift isn’t being hurt by the attention, though it’s not like she needs the bump. The NFL annually crushes everything else in television ratings, and Swift isn’t just being shown all the time (17 times during the Chiefs-Jets game, according to the consensus count), but now she’s getting free promos for her movie. A 30-second spot for “Sunday Night Football” is close to a million dollars, Marchand wrote.
In the Post’s story, it downplayed the impact Swift has had on television ratings, but speculated that the NFL is cozying up to Swift to get her to headline a Super Bowl halftime show, which she has not done yet. If that’s the conclusion to the NFL/Swift mashup, it would create tremendous attention for both sides.
For once, the NFL found someone that can outdo it in terms of fan attention. And the Swift/NFL story probably isn’t fading away anytime soon, no matter whether you’re on the side that likes it or not.
