Kick-off for the 2027-2028 NFL football season is approaching, and with it will come a new slate of winners and losers in the pharma ad space. Ahead of the upcoming season, TV outcomes company EDO is looking back with its NFL TV outcomes report for 2025-2026, ranking the pharma companies and brands that made it to the end zone with high audience engagement scores.
With millions of Americans tuning in each week to catch the latest football game, it’s been well established that the NFL ad space is a lucrative slot for marketing across industries. To put it into context, one single NFL ad last season generated the same total impact as about 73 ads during the average primetime broadcast and cable program, EDO pointed out in its new report, released Sept. 2. EDO measures TV outcomes by analyzing consumer engagement through actions such as branded searches and website visits.
During the most recent season, pharma ads stood out among an array of different brand categories that crowded the NFL airwaves during commercial breaks.
Three out of the top five advertisers for last regular NFL season were pharma brands in Galderma’s skin disease biologic Nemluvio, Novartis’ Pluvicto and Eli Lilly’s Ebyglyss. Nemluvio and Pluvicto in particular nabbed the top two spots overall for ad effectiveness across all advertisers, with Nemluvio named the top NFL regular-season advertiser overall.
Brands and products in the top five were 95% more effective during regular-season games than they were during primetime broadcast and cable spots, EDO explained. According to the outcomes company, Nemluvio’s NFL ads were 1,683% more effective than the average regular-season advertiser, while Pluvicto was 780% more effective.
Top performer Nemluvio had more per-person and per-second engagement than the average ad during the season and marks a new entrant to EDO’s yearly ad effectiveness rating. Ebyglass and Johnson & Johnson’s atypical antipsychotic Caplyta were also new to the top ten, as were Amgen’s Otezla, Lilly’s Zepbound, telehealth company Ro and OTC sleeping med Nyquil. Other mainstays, such as Johnson & Johnson’s Tremfya and AbbVie’s Skyrizi, were bumped down by the new arrivals.
Still, pharma and OTC brands, as a category, were 95% more effective during NFL airings than they were on primetime broadcast and cable, marking the strongest performance amongst all other categories in EDO’s report.
The most effective pharma ads used key strategies such as using covers of well-known songs, as Lilly’s Ebglyss did in its “Not Always Obvious” 60-second spot, or highlighting product benefits with a catchy tagline such as Caplyta’s “Let in the Lyte” ads, EDO pointed out.
“The insights in EDO’s latest TV Outcomes Report reinforce what we see across premium television every year: when brands align with the moments audiences value most, it drives stronger engagement and measurable business outcomes,” Disney Advertising SVP, revenue and yield management Jim Minnich commented in the report.
Outside of the regular NFL season, pharma ads didn’t take center stage as prominently during the Super Bowl. However, Novo Nordisk’s star-studded Wegovy pill promotion snatched the last spot of the top 10 list, with the ad generating 374% more engagement as the median-performing Super Bowl ad in 2026, EDO found.
Immediately after the Super Bowl back in February, EDO found that pharma ads captured 9% of overall engagement during the game, a slice comparable to that of the auto industry and the snacks and candy product sector. In a separate analysis after the regular NFL season came to a close, EDO found that pharma brands aired ads a total of 332 times across the season, up 13% from the previous year.
EDO’s latest report, meanwhile, covers the NFL season as a whole, including Super Bowl outcomes.