Disney Nears Advertising Sellout In 10th Year Of College Football Playoff; Season’s Viewership Surge Precedes Expansion Of CFP Field, Negotiations For New Media Rights Deal

EXCLUSIVE: With the 10th edition of the College Football Playoff set to cap off a high-rated season starting on New Year’s Day, Disney says advertising inventory is nearly sold out for the semifinals and championship.

“We have a lot of consistency with brands,” Deidra Maddock, VP, Sports Brand Solutions, Disney Advertising, told Deadline in an interview. “Not even in just the August-to-January window, but on a year-to-year basis.” Of the 15 official ad partners for the CFP, she added, 13 have had a presence for multiple years and scatter buys are relatively limited. “When brands are making this commitment and knowing that this is a space they want to be in, it’s not a ‘Hey, let’s dip our toe in the water and try it out.’ This is something that they’re investing in.”

The level of buy-in is a welcome development for Disney as a challenging 2023 winds to a close. Linear TV advertising remains soft across the broader industry, and uncertainty about distribution for all TV programmers has followed the media giant’s bruising fight with Charter Communications last September. ESPN is readying a stand-alone streaming version of its flagship network for launch by 2025, which could complicate the balancing act. Disney CEO Bob Iger, who said last summer that linear TV “may not be core” to the company, later reaffirmed that networks offer “a means of aggregating audience and amortizing costs, of basically reaching more and different people.”

College football comprised a large chunk of ESPN’s $3.6 billion of advertising revenue during fiscal 2023, a tally that came in flat compared with the prior year. (Ad revenue across all of Disney totaled $11.5 billion.) Measurement firm EDO’s research found viewers to be 3% more likely to