iSpot on April 15, 2026, launched the first installment of its new recurring series, Outcomes ADvantages, with a case study focused on The Home Depot's television advertising during the 2025 college football regular season. The analysis draws on iSpot's measurement infrastructure to trace a direct line from ad exposure on ESPN to in-store foot traffic - a connection that has long been difficult to document with precision in linear TV environments.

The case study was published on April 15, 2026, and shared with press the same day. It arrives as the TV measurement industry continues a broad push toward outcome-based attribution, moving away from reach and frequency as the primary indicators of advertising value.

What Outcomes ADvantages is

Outcomes ADvantages is described by iSpot as a recurring analytical series designed to show how specific advertisers translate TV strategy into measurable business results. Each installment takes a single brand and examines performance across three dimensions: audience reach, creative effectiveness, and conversion outcomes. The Home Depot is the first brand to be featured.

According to iSpot, the company was founded in 2012 by Sean Muller, who saw a television commercial and found virtually no data available about it. That experience led to the creation of what iSpot describes as the world's only complete TV ad catalog. As of 2026, iSpot says it is trusted by more than 750 brands, agencies, and media companies, and is certified as a National Currency by the U.S. Joint Industry Committee. The company is also accredited by the Media Rating Council (MRC) for National TV Ad Occurrence Reporting.

iSpot's broader mission, according to the company, is "to unify ad measurement across creative, audience and outcomes to drive optimal video advertising performance for our customers."

The Home Depot's scale on ESPN

The Home Depot ranked as the 14th largest TV advertiser by household ad reach in 2025, according to iSpot's data. That standing reflects more than two decades of sustained investment in ESPN's college football coverage - a programming block that runs each fall from late August into early December.

The numbers from the 2025 regular season, which ran from August 28 to December 7, 2025, are substantial. According to iSpot, The Home Depot's ads on ESPN during that period reached nearly 74% of U.S. households, or 89.33 million households in absolute terms. That reach figure puts the scale of the campaign in concrete terms: roughly three in four American homes saw at least one Home Depot ad on ESPN during the college football season.

Volume drove that reach. According to the case study, The Home Depot ranked No. 2 by total ad airings among all advertisers on ESPN during college football games this past season, and No. 1 by total ad minutes. iSpot's data shows The Home Depot logged 153 total ad minutes during the period - ahead of Allstate at 147, GEICO at 145, Modelo at 144, and Dr Pepper at 125. For a brand spending heavily on linear television, securing the top position by ad minutes in a premium sports context is not incidental. It is the result of a deliberate media strategy, one that the brand has refined over more than 20 years.

Creative performance: college football fans respond differently

Beyond raw reach, the case study examines how effectively those ads connected with the audience watching. iSpot measured creative effectiveness across audience segments and found a notable gap between college football fans and the general population.

According to the case study, The Home Depot's ads that aired on ESPN were 8.4% more effective with college football fans than the general population norm. That gap also outpaced The Home Depot's performance with NFL fans and other sports audiences, suggesting a specific affinity between college football viewership and the home improvement retailer's messaging.

The ads that appeared specifically on ESPN during college football - as distinct from the broader season slate - showed even stronger results. According to the case study, those ESPN placements were 9% more effective among college football fans compared to the retail category norm.

One creative stood out among all spots aired during the season. The "Black Friday: Holiday Ready" ad achieved a 61% positive purchase intent score among ESPN college football viewers, according to iSpot's measurement. The seasonal average for comparable ads was 54%, meaning that particular creative outperformed the benchmark by 7 percentage points. Purchase intent is a forward-looking indicator that measures whether viewers say they intend to buy following exposure to an ad - making it a meaningful signal for a brand with a heavy transactional focus like The Home Depot.

Outcomes: from screen to store

The conversion data in the case study is where the analysis becomes most pointed. iSpot measured in-store visit conversion lift, defined as the lift in store visits among consumers who were exposed to the ads on ESPN versus converters who were not exposed. That metric isolates the incremental effect of the ESPN placement, rather than simply counting total store visits.

According to the case study, The Home Depot's ads on ESPN during the 2025 college football regular season drove a 42% in-store visit conversion lift. To be precise, iSpot's data places the figure at 42.2%, comparing ESPN placements against ads appearing during other programming. That differential positions college football as a meaningful driver of foot traffic, not just brand awareness.

Of all households exposed to The Home Depot's ads on ESPN during the season, 34.55 million converted - meaning they made an in-store visit that iSpot's methodology attributed to that ad exposure. That is a large absolute number, representing roughly 38.6% of the 89.33 million households that were exposed to the ads at all.

Two additional data points address the mechanics of how those conversions happened. First, conversion speed: according to iSpot's data, 50% of converted households exposed to The Home Depot's ads on ESPN converted within four days of watching an ad. That is a relatively short window for a retailer selling large-ticket home improvement items, and it suggests the advertising was connecting with audiences already in or near a purchase mindset.

Second, the frequency required to drive conversion was lower than might be expected. According to the case study, 50% of exposed converted households had seen seven or fewer Home Depot ad impressions on ESPN before visiting a store. That figure has implications for how the brand manages media efficiency: the audience does not appear to require saturation-level frequency to act. Seven or fewer impressions driving half of all conversions suggests an audience that is relatively primed and receptive, rather than one that needs repeated prompting.

The case study contextualizes the late-Q3 and Q4 timing as strategically relevant. College football season overlaps with The Home Depot's key trading period - the stretch that encompasses fall home projects, Halloween, and the lead-up to Black Friday and the holiday season. The "Black Friday: Holiday Ready" creative's strong purchase intent score reinforces how closely the brand's messaging aligned with the calendar.

Why this matters for the measurement industry

The launch of Outcomes ADvantages is notable not just for what it reveals about The Home Depot, but for what it signals about where TV measurement is heading. iSpot has been building out its outcomes infrastructure for several years. The company introduced its first attribution capabilities in 2017, and launched its Outcomes at Scale product in March 2025, which connects verified on-screen ad impressions to lower-funnel metrics including store visits, online activity, and ticket purchases in near real-time.

The Outcomes ADvantages series appears to be a content vehicle designed to demonstrate that infrastructure's practical value, using named brands and real-season data rather than anonymized benchmarks. By publishing a named case study with specific figures, iSpot is inviting scrutiny - and inviting brands in comparable categories to consider how their own ESPN investments compare.

Roku became the first streaming platform to use iSpot's Outcomes at Scale for campaign optimization in January 2026, with early tests on SimpliSafe showing a 23% increase in leads and a 31% boost in website visits. That integration represents the outcome-measurement infrastructure moving from passive reporting to active campaign management. The Home Depot case study operates at an earlier stage - post-season analysis rather than in-flight optimization - but it uses the same underlying attribution framework.

iSpot has also expanded its reach into programmatic CTV through a partnership with TripleLift in December 2024, integrating its Streaming Competitive Dashboard into TripleLift's platform with two metrics - Streaming Media Weight and Streaming Share of Voice - to give programmatic buyers a more complete picture of CTV performance.

For marketers, the practical question raised by data like this is whether other premium sports environments produce comparable conversion lift. The Home Depot's 42.2% lift versus other programming is a notable result, but it emerges from a brand that has invested in the same property for more than 20 years and whose product category - home improvement - correlates naturally with fall purchasing behavior. Whether the result generalizes to brands in other categories, or to sports environments other than college football, is a question the series may eventually address in future installments.

The relationship between reach and conversion is rarely linear. The Home Depot's performance on ESPN suggests that concentrated investment in a contextually relevant environment, combined with sales-focused creative, can produce measurable foot traffic at scale. That combination - audience alignment, message relevance, and sustained presence - is harder to replicate than the individual components, and the measurement data here illustrates why long-running sponsorship relationships can accumulate advantages that are difficult to unwind.

PPC Land has tracked iSpot's growing role in the TV measurement landscape, including its February 2026 launch of SAGE AI, an agentic platform that analyzes 2.5 million advertisements through frame-by-frame processing and around 100 million consumer survey responses to generate creative insights and strategic recommendations. The SAGE launch reflects a broader shift in how measurement companies are packaging their data - moving toward AI-assisted interpretation rather than raw dashboards.

The intersection of TV attribution and retail media is also relevant context here. As PPC Land has noted, retail media is projected to capture 20% of global advertising revenue by 2030, according to Omdia research published in September 2025. The Home Depot is not a retail media network in the conventional sense, but it operates in a retail environment where the ability to attribute TV ad exposure to store visits gives it a clearer picture of how its off-site media investments translate into on-site revenue.

Timeline

Summary

Who: iSpot, the TV ad measurement and attribution company founded in 2012 and certified as a National Currency by the U.S. Joint Industry Committee, published the debut installment of its Outcomes ADvantages series, examining The Home Depot's television advertising strategy.

What: The case study documents The Home Depot's performance during the 2025 ESPN college football regular season, covering audience reach (74% of U.S. households, or 89.33 million), creative effectiveness (8.4% more effective with college football fans than the general population norm), and conversion outcomes (42.2% in-store visit conversion lift versus other programming, with 34.55 million households converting). The brand ranked No. 1 by ad minutes on ESPN during the season at 153 total minutes, and the "Black Friday: Holiday Ready" creative achieved a 61% positive purchase intent score among ESPN college football viewers. Fifty percent of converted households converted within four days of exposure, and 50% converted after seeing seven or fewer impressions.

When: The case study covers the 2025 college football regular season, which ran from August 28 to December 7, 2025. The first installment of Outcomes ADvantages was published on April 15, 2026.

Where: The advertising activity measured ran on ESPN during college football games. The case study was published by iSpot and distributed to media.

Why: iSpot launched Outcomes ADvantages to demonstrate how TV advertising investment translates into concrete business outcomes, using named brand data and season-level metrics. For the broader marketing industry, the series marks another step in the shift from reach-and-frequency reporting toward outcome-based measurement - a transition that iSpot has been building toward since introducing its first attribution capabilities in 2017 and accelerating with the 2025 launch of Outcomes at Scale.

Share this article
The link has been copied!