‘Ways to Watch’ has won Silver in Digital Experience at The Drum Awards for Marketing for solving a critical trust problem: 20 million fans visited NFL.com every Sunday only to bounce to YouTube or pirate streams because the site couldn’t answer the only question that mattered – ‘How do I watch my team right now?’ Here is the award-winning case study.
The NFL has been an American institution for more than a century, and NFL.com is its front porch. By 2025, that porch was cracked with slow pages and buried information. Every Sunday, 20M+ fans arrived for a score or schedule then bounced to YouTube, Reddit, Bleacher Report or pirated streams to answer the only question that mattered: “How do I watch my team right now?”
Fans weren’t abandoning football. They were losing trust in the NFL’s own home.
At the same time, the league shifted toward a direct-to-consumer future. NFL+, the league’s proprietary streaming platform, powers that shift, but the website wasn’t built to explain NFL+ or convert viewers to it.
Our objective was to leverage the NFL’s massive web presence and deploy a strategy that guides the digital experience in driving the next generation of global fandom.
The strategy
After reimagining the NFL app just one year ago, the NFL uncovered key insights about how web fandom differs from app fandom.
Apps are loyalty-driven and seasonal; the web is utility-driven, always on and moment-based.
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The breakthrough insight: Fans on the web don’t browse; they decide. Every visit to NFL.com is a question: What’s happening? What matters? How do I watch?
With that revitalized playbook, the NFL transformed its digital flagship into a real-time decision engine in just one season.
The execution
What was once a static information hub is now a smarter, faster companion that meets fans in the moment and guides them to what matters most.
At the center of the experience is Ways to Watch, an all-new universal utility that considers game time, location, broadcast rights, team affinity and subscription status to tell fans exactly how to watch any game instantly. No guessing, hunting or bouncing.
One of the NFL’s most impactful shifts to its digital experience is the total migration to the same scalable design system and adaptive component library that powers the NFL app, social, connected TV, OOH and more. This system ensures brand governance and consistency across the NFL’s plethora of touchpoints, and now, the digital experience too. While invisible to fans, the design system is foundational to powering how NFL.com delivers the vast array of player, team, geographic and historical content fans crave. One system seamlessly adapts to and showcases 32 teams over 272 games and 1,200+ players all year long.
Perhaps most important of all, the reinvented digital experience is faster, redesigned for high-intent moments (scores, schedules, standings, highlights) and has been replatformed to a headless architecture. The NFL replaced clutter with clarity, static templates with responsive logic and friction with flow.
Once a static, digital brochure, NFL.com now actively guides fandom, turning intent into action.
The results
It’s not every day a massive, global business rips out its digital core to invest in a strategic, time-intensive customer experience transformation. But the numbers prove that it benefited fans as much as the NFL’s business:
NFL.com homepage increased its reach by 12% YoY.Game Details experience grew by 79% in orders of NFL+ YoY.RedZone’s reach was up 12% YoY, and NFL+ orders were up 145%, with Weekly Average Users (WAU) up 19% YoY.Ways to Watch’s reach grew NFL+ orders by 653%.
The NFL rebuilt its digital experience as the connective tissue between fandom and commerce, reinvigorating the trust of the league’s 150 million web visitors.
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