The NFL season kicks off in one week, and pharma brands are eager to return to the gridiron. According to the fourth annual NFL TV Outcomes Report released by EDO on Wednesday morning, pharma brands were among the top advertisers during the 2025-26 NFL regular season. The TV outcomes company found that three of the top five regular-season advertisers, including the top two, were pharma brands.
Standout performers included Galderma’s Nemluvio, Novartis’ Pluvicto, Eli Lilly’s Ebglyss, Johnson & Johnson’s Caplyta and Sanofi/Regeneron’s Dupixent. Nemluvio led all advertisers with 1,683% stronger engagement than the NFL average.
EDO’s report found that ads from pharma brands were 95% more effective on a per-impression engagement basis during regular-season NFL games than they were during primetime broadcast and cable. Laura Grover, SVP and head of client solutions at EDO, said this was the highest lift of any category EDO measured for the season.
For the segment as a whole, pharma and OTC brands aired 400 unique commercials and generated 7.5 billion impressions during the NFL regular season. The momentum continued into the postseason and through Super Bowl LX, Grover added, as pharma brands experienced a 250% gain in per-impression engagement compared to the benchmark.
“It was just a great year for pharma in the NFL,” she said. “They’ve had good moments in the Super Bowl and other sports, and they are a category that continues to spend heavily on linear TV as well as streaming.”
Several key factors drove pharma to such success, beyond the extensive reach of NFL broadcasts that dominate linear TV ratings. Grover noted that the creative produced by pharma brands tended to focus on broad, high-incidence disease states, such as eczema, plaque psoriasis and other dermatological conditions. Considering that millions of people watch the average primetime NFL broadcast, drugmakers have opted to focus their messaging on diseases that are likely to be experienced by large segments of viewers.
However, Grover noted that GLP-1 advertising, including ads for Novo Nordisk, Ro and Hims & Hers during the Super Bowl, as well as mental health ads, also began to appear more often during the 2025-26 season. She singled out J&J’s Caplyta ads for major depressive disorder as a proof of concept, showing drugmakers can expand the types of conditions marketed to football fans. Caplyta also had the highest number of airings during the regular season among the featured brands, per EDO.
As for why these pharma ads, which are typically lengthier than the average consumer spot and filled with clinical safety information, resonated so much with viewers, Grover suggested that the composition of NFL audiences differs from pharma’s traditional focus on older viewers. The Ebglyss ad from Lilly featuring a remix of Mary J. Blige’s hit song “Real Love” is an example of new creative resonating with a younger audience likely encountering it for the first time at scale.
“It’s likely that, more so than other categories, pharma is finding new audiences that are not seeing their ads as much in other media environments,” she said. “So it’s that new news that’s going to capture their attention and pay off for them in these broad-reach events.”
To keep the momentum going into the 2026-27 season, Grover suggested that medical marketers emphasize the balance between linear TV and streaming platforms. She said live sports remain a lean-in environment for brands, especially pharma companies, due to the size of the audiences and their high level of engagement with the programming. As more streaming platforms have acquired rights to NFL regular season and postseason games, she said brands are advised to utilize linear TV for reach while also diversifying their exposure by advertising on streamers.
Source: www.mmm-online.com — Read the original article
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