Fan Intensity, Team Identification, and Banner Ad Recall in Televised Football Broadcasts

Stadium advertising boards are a central sponsorship asset in televised association football, yet their recall effects may depend on how viewers relate to the sport, the team, the sponsor, and the viewing context. This exploratory study examined aided and unaided recall of in-field banner advertisements using an in- and out-of-laboratory experiment with 701 participants exposed to controlled footage from a real football match. General fan intensity, game situation (highlight vs. standard scenes), and screen size did not show consistent associations with recall across the 16 sponsor brands. However, recall differed substantially across individual brands, and home-team fans showed higher recall for several prominent sponsors than non-home-team fans. These findings suggest that general football fan intensity should be distinguished from team-specific identification and that sponsor recall in realistic broadcast settings is likely shaped by the interplay of team identification, sponsor–team relevance, prior brand familiarity, and viewing context. The study therefore positions perimeter advertising as a cue-dependent communication format whose effectiveness should not be inferred from exposure alone.