For family members feeling disenfranchised by dad’s obsession with pro football, the news is only getting worse.
Two weeks into the 2006 NFL season, there are more games on than ever before and they are more popular than ever before. ESPN, which inherited the “Monday Night Football” franchise from its Walt Disney Co. sibling ABC, debuted with record ratings. CBS and Fox are broadcasting their usual number of games and this year, the NFL Network is adding eight more. The network, whose production facilities are in El Segundo, will broadcast not only via cable but also on the home teams’ regular broadcast channel.
“The NFL is the largest entertainment property in our culture; it produces almost 60 Nielsen ratings points per week,” said sports consultant Neal Pilson. A new study from Arbitron Inc. suggests that the number of viewers who strap on their TV-watching chinstraps every Sunday and Monday night and often on Thursdays may be greater than thought until now.
To test its new Portable People Meter audience measurement system, Arbitron focused on viewers in the Houston TV market. Why Houston, which ranks as only the 10th largest media market in the nation, compared to Los Angeles at No. 2? Houston has an NFL team and Los Angeles doesn’t.
For four games measured by PPMs in Houston, out-of-home viewers accounted for 31.1 percent, 27.1 percent, 24.9 percent and 18.3 percent of the total audience in the 25 to 54 age demographic. The study found similar results for the male 18 to 49 category, a core audience for sports advertisers. Those numbers are a whopping increase from the 13 percent average figure reported using previous measurement systems.
The PPM studies “show that almost one third of the audience for NFL football in key demographic groups have gone largely uncounted to date,” Arbitron stated. For advertisers, the study could lead to higher spot prices to reflect inclusion of the formerly unmeasured viewers.
Ad Account Shakeup
Some big-money advertising accounts have moved around the L.A. metroplex during this year’s third quarter. All the switches involve billings worth at least $100 million, and all the clients work in the media sector.
Lions Gate Entertainment, based in Vancouver but with a large L.A. footprint, earlier this month moved its $130 million account to Initiative, a New York-based unit of Interpublic Group. The business previously belonged to Palisades Media Group in Santa Monica. During the same week MGM moved its $100 million account from Palisades to Rubin Postaer & Associates, also in Santa Monica.
Finally, Expedia Inc. parted company with Interpublic’s Deutsch/LA in Marina del Rey. The travel site gave the $170 million account to Doner, an independent agency in Southfield, Mich. Doner beat another local agency Omnicom Group’s TBWAChiatDay in Playa del Rey for the business.
However, the biggest L.A. media cookie remains on the table. News Corp.’s Fox film divisions have put their $1 billion consolidated account into play. Interpublic has dropped out of competition because it won the business from competitor Lions Gate. Until now, New York-based Mindshare has handled most of the Fox media buys.
Right Mags, Wrong Time
Last week, a memo from Time Inc. Chief Executive Ann Moore reportedly said that the publisher would sell 18 magazines. Nearly all of them once belonged to Times-Mirror, the former corporate name of the Los Angeles Times.
The ex-Times titles include Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, Popular Mechanics, Yachting, Saltwater Sportsman and MotorBoating. In addition, the winter titles (Ski, Skiing), the TransWorld titles (Skateboarding, Snowboarding, Surf, Motocross) and several bike books formerly belonged to T-M. Of the original Times-Mirror assets, only Golf Magazine will remain in the Time Inc. orbit.
New York-based Time Inc. acquired the T-M properties in 2000 for $475 million. At the time, Chief Executive Don Logan said: “We’re delighted to have the Times Mirror titles become part of Time Inc. We think that their vertical sports enthusiast titles are a perfect fit with the Sports Illustrated group.”
Six years later, the memo from Moore reportedly stated that top management had decided to sell the titles to focus resources on its big brands. That includes titles such as Cooking Light, Progressive Farmer and Coastal Living. After the sell-off, Time will own 132 titles, and plenty of them have circulations and name-recognition far below the former T-M titles.
Instead of a business strategy, the decision looks like a case of corporate culture incompatibility. The T-M acquisition was a graft that never bonded with the flesh and blood of Time. While only a few of the titles are based now on the West Coast (the TransWorld titles in Tustin), most of them reflect a Western or Midwestern sensibility. But the famous Ivy League mentality of Time cleaves more to golf than hunting. Yachting stands out as the only East-centric book on the sell list, included perhaps to provide critical weight to the marine set of titles.
Hollywood wisdom reminds executives to consider how a movie will play in Peoria. A lot of bad films still strive to please only a small clique of insiders, but Hollywood isn’t alone in suffering from narrow geo-social thinking. Publishers can lose strategic assets if they think big brands consist only of those that play well east of the Hudson River.
Staff reporter Joel Russell can be reached at
[email protected]
or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 237.
