There are a converted touchdown's worth of reasons whty the National Football League has become the gold standard of television engagement as measured by ratings.
Among the trends it benefits with in common with the other major North American professional sports leagues is the enhanced television viewing experience ushered in by the advent and evolution of HD and large-screen format products. The NFL is also the beneficiary of the proliferation of social media platforms as viral tools to drive traffic to its television platform. Like the other pro leagues, it is benefitting from a larger United States, both in terms of gross population and -- especially -- the number of TV households.
Yet the NFL is TV gold for myriad other reasons as well. It avoids audience burnout by staging a compact, four-month regular season of 16 games with an efficient, five-week playoff tournament leading to the big payoff known as Super Bowl.
It commands its audience with destination TV Sundays, Monday nights and now increasingly Thursdays.
The other sports to some degree market their personalities, but the NFL is truly star-based, with quarterbacks providing TV audiences with a focus of attention that only baseball can rival with its pitchers and hitters doing one-on-one situational combat.
Yet in my view easily the best thing football has going for it is cultural dominance...and it's cultural dominance driven by a television strategy and media platform that is second to none. Multiple stakeholders spanning each of the major networks in one form or another are part of the NFL "family": NBC, FOX, CBS and ESPN (representing, of course, Disney/ABC).
That approach leads to sports news and feature coverage like no other sport, following the cycle of high school football Fridays, college football Saturdays and pro football Sundays. For added measure, it's extended by Thursday night games at the front end of the weekend (cross-promoting what's to come Sunday) and backended by Monday Night Football as the perfect reminder of what fans saw -- or missed -- the previous weekend.
It generates lead-in programming coverage that makes Sunday, more than any other day, Football Day in America.
Finally, it leads to cross-promotion that sees each of the rival networks predisposed to hyping Super Bowl, even in the years when they don't have the rights. It's the best of both worlds as the networks compete by striving to outdo each other on their coverage but cooperate by respectfully cross-promoting, especially during the Super Bowl tournament.
That's why the audiences for Super Bowl grow each year and that's why yet another record will be set today.
It's the latter reasons that really bring light users and casual fans to the table, doubling the base of harder core football fans who tune in for the conference championships to the tune of 55M average audience numbers. It's casual fans that take it into nine-figure TV audiences and make it the biggest TV show in North America, with each February surpassing the last.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Friday, July 15, 2011
Pending resolution to lockout keeps NFL from losing games
Yet the fact that a settlement is imminent after weeks of constructive, behind-the-scenes negotiations should shape the way we perceive the NFL, a $9 billion a year sport industry sector that has overtaken baseball as America’s pastime and is the single biggest sports marketing juggernaut on the continent.
It’s important because it appears that the NFL will once again avoid losing games to a work stoppage, something that cannot be said of the other three major North American leagues, especially over the past 24 years since football's last work stoppage in 1987.
The NBA is in its second lockout in 13 years and third in history, with the most recent one having cost pro basketball 32 regular season games in 1998-’99. The NHL has lost a season and a half in the past 17 years, including 2004-’05 when the full season and Stanley Cup playoffs were cancelled due to its second lockout in the span of a decade. Finally, Major League Baseball saw its World Series classic cancelled on account of the players strike of 1994, the last time two leagues were in concurrent work stoppages.
Yet the NFL appears to know better. Outside of 1987, in which it lost one game and played three others with replacement players , the NFL has a relatively unblemished record when it comes to losing games to labour crises and has never done so through a lockout. It is true it lost seven weeks on a player strike back in 1982, but that season was salvaged with a 16-team playoff tournament. In 1974, a players strike was resolved before training camps began.
In 2011, with television ratings and revenues at an all-time high, it was a risky proposition to chance the NFL's future growth, let alone its status as the biggest sport in North America.
Neither the NFL nor the NFLPA should feel proud of failing to get a deal done before the CBA expired in March. That represented a failure on both sides.
Yet kudos should go to both the owners and the players for understanding what kind of impact cancelled games could have had on the privileged position all parties involved hold in the fantasy world of professional sport. And it is exactly that - privileged.
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Friday, July 1, 2011
One-two punch of CFL and NHL free agency make Canada Day hot
It's been cranked up a few degrees in fan attention thanks to the increasingly explicit positioning of the CFL kick-off around Canada Day weekend. Made more formal over the past two years, it is part of CFL Commissioner Mark Cohon's smart campaign to promote the CFL on the strength of its Canadiana and heritage. A kick-off on Canada Day is as natural as maple syrup and it goes a long way towards driving home that "CFL as Canadian culture" message.
By definition, TSN becomes the fulcrum for a lion's share of the interest. It is the exclusive English-language home of the CFL on TSN and its hockey panel is the most-watched for coverage of day one of NHL free agency. It's certainly one of the biggest days of the year for the 27-year-old all-sports network and its French-language counterpart, RDS.
In fact, TSN and RDS are arguably front-and-centre on two of the biggest days in Canadian sport each year - the CFL's Canada Day Doubleheader on July 1st and the biggest single-day annual event in our landscape, the Grey Cup on the final Sunday in November (both the CFL's Grey Cup and the NFL's Super Bowl are in the 6 to 7 million range as the top annual events in terms of average national audience on Canadian television).
Only January 1st rivals July 1st as fixed-day destination television, although even that is not as "fixed": Witness the NHL's decision to move its NBC Winter Classic to July 2nd next year and let the NFL do its playoff thing on New Year's Day (assuming, of course, that saner heads prevail and the U.S. football season goes on without a lockout hitch).
For now, July 1st is truly Canada Day when it comes to sports, sports television and the sports web.
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