Does DMA Impact NBA Finals TV Advertising?

It’s that time of year again when the best two teams in the NBA shine in the Finals. It’s also time for ABC/Disney to excel in terms of ad revenue. The network has hosted the championship series for over two decades, since 2003. TV advertising, both linear and digital, has generated massive sales, consistently in the neighborhood of nine figures each year.

Matchups and Ad Revenue

It’s often brought up among basketball fans and marketers alike that the NBA hopes for certain big market matchups, such as New York, Los Angeles, or the Bay Area, to maximize viewership and ad revenue. If that’s the case, this year’s final between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers, would be a huge disappointment. Oklahoma City is the 47^th largest market in the US, just behind Greensboro-High Point-Winston Salem. The Pacers, based in Indianapolis, rank 25.

The table below shows the matchups over the best several years since 2020, highlighting TV market share size by team, the combined TV share for each matchup, the number of games in the series, and the estimated total TV ad revenue.

The NBA had two notable clashes of heavyweight media markets, the first in 2022, when the Golden State Warriors faced off against the Celtics, and again in 2024 when the Boston Celtics returned to defeat the Dallas Mavericks. Which brings us back to our question, does the team market matter in terms of advertising and revenue?

The short answer is a resounding no. When all these stats are run through the correlation math there is no significant correlation. Surprisingly, the larger combined DMA market share does not predict higher ad revenue, at least if the past several series are considered. The highest grossing Finals for ABC/Disney was the 2021 matchup between the Phoenix Suns and Milwaukee Bucks, two mid-size markets with a combined TV market share only larger than this year’s series. This generated a quarter of a billion dollars in a spend, significantly higher than the matchups that followed.

Games Matter

So what does influence ad spend for the NBA Finals? Perhaps the simplest factor is the number of games in the series. There is a strong correlation between the number of games played and the TV ad revenue. The 2021 and 2022 series drove tens of millions more ad revenue due to the fact they were longer. More games means more ad inventory, regardless of what teams/markets are involved.

The ad spend will come in whether it’s the Knicks, Celtic, Warriors, Thunder or Pacers. The team variable that matters most is on the court. ABC/Disney must have been cheering extra hard when the Bucks rallied, down 0-2, in 2021’s game 3 to stretch the series to 6 games. The last series to feature 7 games in the Finals’ best of 7 format was back in 2016 when Lebron led Cleveland (#19 TV market) to its first ever championship. The worst-case scenario, a 4-game sweep, last occurred when Kevin Durrant’s Warriors swept Cleveland in 2018, generating (a modest?) 150 million in TV ad spend. It’s safe to say Disney execs will be rooting for the Pacers and Thunder to go all the way to game 7.

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