Squid Game is back. Will advertisers join the game?

Squid Game season two ended with a nail-biting cliffhanger, amassing record viewership numbers and even a Golden Globe nod. But advertisers seeking to reach masses of tuned-in viewers on connected TV (CTV) would do well to also look at games played on fields and courts, rather than in mysterious hangars.

Fan fervor, courtesy of a global promotional campaign, may have helped pad the series’ record numbers. Figures released by Netflix show that Squid Game season two was the most-watched program for the week of December 23 to 29 in 92 out of the 93 countries where it’s available.

The one country where it wasn’t? The United States, where Netflix’s Christmas Day NFL specials dominated. Netflix’s scale also meant the two NFL games were the most streamed in the league’s history.

Crucially, the NFL games drew the biggest Christmas Day viewership in the U.S. among 18- to 34-year-olds in more than 20 years. The NBA, carried by Disney’s streaming properties, also saw big results, setting a record for its most-watched Christmas Day slate of games in five years in the U.S.

“The entertainment media ecosystem may be more fragmented than ever, making it more challenging for a supershow to obtain a critical mass of eyeballs,” says Brandon Katz, senior entertainment industry strategist at Parrot Analytics.

The very factors that made Squid Game so popular also made it something of a niche proposition, argues Jennifer Kohl, chief media officer of U.S. media at VML. “Squid Game probably has a very specific audience that can tolerate what I’ll call ‘shock.’”

The era of the boundary-breaking supershow may not be over quite yet, but recent moves by Netflix suggest it is busy looking beyond them to attract audiences coveted by brands and to grow its ad business.

Just last week, Netflix started streaming live episodes of WWE’s Raw, a wrestling event. “They’re going to try to attract a certain audience that I might argue Netflix doesn’t currently have, like really young males,” says Kohl. Netflix will reportedly pay $5 billion over 10 years to show Raw and other WWE programming.

The success of Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football so far underscores that brands are placing a premium on top sports content. The e-commerce giant is expected to return to this year’s Upfronts with an even bigger sports offering. “There’s no way that [Netflix] is sitting in their conference rooms and not talking about Amazon,” says Kohl.

The virality of supershows is also an unpredictable factor for media buyers. “The [content] pipes are so big that you’re almost playing Whack-A-Mole. Every day there could be a different ‘mole’ that’s sticking their head out and could be very buzzy,” says Kohl. At the same time, even with top sports events like the Super Bowl, it’s hard for brands to know whether a game will be a blowout by halftime or a nail-biter until the end, adds Kohl.

Instead, she notes that just like with personal finance portfolios, a brand’s media portfolio should seek diversification to achieve the engagement needed to drive the brand forward. “We don’t have a ton of clients that are just chasing the buzz. But they do want what I’ll call ‘hits of buzz,’ of course,” says Kohl.

“Major sports broadcast rights are so expensive that the majority are used as loss-leaders in this business,” adds Parrot Analytics’ Katz. “It is the library of in-house originals and licensed programming that keeps [viewers] there, especially during a sports league’s offseason.”

As live sports continue their migration to CTV, and as streamers invest in established shows, the likes of Squid Game may soon become the exception rather than the rule in media buyers’ winning CTV investment playbooks.

“No content arms race will ever be as feverish as the early streaming wars were,” says Katz. “Familiar concepts and preestablished intellectual property will always be easier to sell and boast higher floors than original new-to-screen concepts.”