A Knicks-Spurs Finals rematch 27 years in the making, a growing WNBA, and standout tournament finals from both NCAA men's and women's basketball drove ad impact across every major property this season
NEW YORK, October 15, 2026 - New research released by EDO, the TV outcomes company, finds that ads airing during basketball programming generated 4.1x as much impact as the average ad on broadcast and cable primetime during the 2025-26 season, up 13% from the prior year, drawing on more than 105,000 ad airings and 132 billion impressions across 1,013 brands.
EDO's annual 2026 Basketball TV Outcomes Report finds that no property in Convergent TV is growing its value to advertisers across more dimensions than basketball. The NBA Finals headlined the year: a Knicks-Spurs rematch 27 years in the making drew passionate fans on both sides, and the average Finals ad generated 132x as much impact as the primetime broadcast and cable average, nearly double last year's figure. Across the board, the women's game kept raising the stakes, with WNBA ad impact up 5% year over year and the NCAA women's title game driving 77% greater impact than the 2025 championship.
"Basketball audiences act," said Laura Grover, SVP, Head of Client Solutions at EDO. "Whether it's a regular-season Wednesday night game streaming on Prime Video or a Final Four Saturday on broadcast, the data consistently shows that on TV, basketball drives the kind of ad-driven engagement that predicts future sales. Women's basketball made that case especially clear this year: the tournament finals and the WNBA didn't just hold their ground, they grew."
EDO ties each ad airing directly to the consumer behaviors most predictive of future sales by measuring the incremental spike in online engagement within minutes of an ad running, applying the same investment-grade standard across every network, every platform, and every game on the calendar.
Key findings in EDO's 2026 Basketball TV Outcomes Report include:
Explore EDO's full findings — including brand and creative rankings across the NBA, WNBA, and NCAA in EDO’s 2026 Basketball TV Outcomes Report — available now at edo.com/basketball.
ABOUT EDO
EDO is the TV outcomes company. Our leading measurement platform connects convergent TV airings to the ad-driven consumer behaviors most predictive of future sales. EDO empowers the advertising industry to maximize media impact, measure creative performance, and know the fair value of every impression — across linear and streaming for an increasingly programmatic world. By combining immediate engagement signals with world-class decision science and vertical AI, EDO equips industry leaders with syndicated, investment-grade data that aligns media to business results — with detailed competitive, category, and historical insights. Leading brands, agencies, networks, streamers, and studios trust EDO’s TV intelligence to know what works.
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