The Tailgate - My Final Photography Project

Packers Radio Annoncer Wayne Larrivee Joins the Sunday Huddle

 Wayne Larrivee has called Packers games since 1999, and he called Chicago Bears games for 14 season prior that. He's done basketball, baseball, professional, and collegiate football, and he was kind enough to join us on the Sunday Huddle to share his incites on his career, the Packers, Aaron Rodgers, the Monday Night Football game against the Vikings, and more!

Watch the NFL Joins The Sunday Huddle In Studio

Michael Koval, President of Watch the NFL, joined the Sunday Huddle to discuss the new Wisconsin annicitaive to bring fans of every NFL team together to watch their games. The mission: leave no fan behind! You can find out more about Watch the NFL on their Facebook page.

The NFL King of the World - But Where is MNF?

Take a moment to review these numbers - the list of the 20 most watched shows of the fall 2010 TV season. Notice a pattern?

Program (Game)                                                                        Viewers
1. FOX Thanksgiving Day (Saints-Cowboys), 11/25                 31.9 million*
2. CBS Sunday National (mostly Patriots-Bears), 12/12            30.5 million
3. FOX Sunday National (mostly Packers-Eagles), 9/12            28.0 million
4. CBS Sunday National (mostly Colts-Eagles), 11/7                27.8 million
5. CBS Thanksgiving Day (Patriots-Lions), 11/25                    27.8 million*
6. NBC Thursday Kickoff (Vikings-Saints), 9/9                            27.5 million*
7. FOX Sunday National (mostly Cowboys-Colts), 12/5            27.4 million
8. CBS Sunday National (mostly Raiders-Cowboys), 9/19           27.0 million
9. FOX Sunday National (mostly Eagles-Bears), 11/28                26.6 million
10. FOX Sunday National (mostly Cowboys-Giants), 11/14     26.2 million
11. FOX Sunday National (mostly Bears-Packers), 1/2/11           26.1 million
12. FOX Sunday National (mostly Cowboys-Vikings), 10/17        26.0 million
13. NBC Sunday Night Football (Eagles-Cowboys), 12/12            25.7 million*
14. CBS Sunday National (mostly Jets-Steelers), 12/19              25.7 million
15. NBC Sunday Night Football (Vikings-Packers), 10/24           25.7 million*
16. NBC Sunday Night Football (Cowboys-Redskins), 9/12        25.3 million*
17. CBS Sunday National (mostly Vikings-Patriots), 10/31        25.2 million
18. FOX Sunday National (mostly Giants-Packers), 12/26          24.3 million
19t. ABC Dancing with the Stars (season finale pt 2), 11/23        24.2 million
19t. NBC Sunday Night Football (Packers-Patriots), 12/19          24.2 million*

The numbers by network add up to:

FOX: 8/20
CBS: 6/20
NBC: 5/20
ABC: 1/20

But the most important (and obvious) conclusion drawn from the stats is:

NFL Football: 19/20
The World: 1/20

In the Land of TV programming it’s the NFL vs. the World... and the competition is not close.

I put up the total numbers for each major broadcast network (the CW did not have a show qualify) because I wanted to draw attention to ABC whose Dancing With the Stars season finale was the lone non-football program to crack the top twenty, but also stands alone as the only network to not broadcast NFL action. They used to though - on a little show called Monday Night Football.

Quick history lesson. The above numbers, ironically, might never be what they are without ABC, the network that pioneered and perfected the NFL on prime time (Monday and Sunday Nights). Prior to 2006, ABC broadcast Monday Night Football and ESPN, ABC’s sister cable network (both under the Disney umbrella), showcased Sunday Night Football. FOX and CBS split the day games, leaving NBC the lone network out in the cold.

In 2006, ABC, ESPN, and the NFL struck a deal that moved MNF to ESPN, discontinued ABC’s presence on SNF, and opened the door for NBC to stake a claim in what NBC sports chairman Dick Ebersol called, “the best deal you can get in television.” The network signed a deal with that would pay the league $600,000 per game through 2011.

This is the way NFL broadcasts have been structured since 2006, and with both NBC and ESPN re-upping their deals within the past few months, will be the structure for the foreseeable future.

An unbelievable fountain of almost certain ratings wealth flows from football broadcasts. Yet Disney, by choosing to broadcast their only game of the week on a cable channel (ESPN) versus a network (ABC), eliminates themselves from the ratings competition. Everyone with a digital receiver can tap into network broadcasts, but only households with select cable subscriptions can enjoy ESPN.

In 2010, ESPN’s MNF averaged 14 million viewers over 17 telecasts. NBC’s SNF averaged an incredible 21.8 million viewers over 18 broadcasts and went undefeated versus the competition en route to becoming the number one prime-time program of the year. Even though both ESPN and NBC offer the same product, a cable channel cannot compete with the numbers NBC posted in 2010 on a weekly basis. The 2010 BCS National Championship Game (Auburn vs. Oregon) became the most watched cable program of all time, drawing 27.3 million viewers - but one game does not a series make.

More than likely, however, Disney does not care about competing with NBC for prime-time ratings. While they stumble to keep up in numbers, they undoubtedly reap an incredible profit. ESPN charges more per subscription than any other cable channel. Subscribers pay about $5 per month for ESPN and ESPN2 even if they don’t watch it.

So do the math. If 14 million viewers watch a game, each of them paying $5 per month for access to the channel, Disney makes more than enough off of subscriptions to pay any attention to how they fare in the ratings.

Ultimately, its the fan that lost in 2006 when Disney decided to shift its prime-time coverage away from ABC. Not the 14 million people with a cable subscription, but the millions more - like me - forced either to pirate games or go to a bar.

The television industry views NFL games like a pot of gold. As the eye-popping numbers in my first chart suggest, there is no better guarantee for an audience on any other entertainment platform, especially amongst the “critical audience” of 18-49 year-olds. ESPN’s Monday Night Football draws staggering numbers for a cable program, they pull incredible numbers from national advertisers, and subscription fees; therefore, nothing - not even ratings - would force Disney to make the move back to network television.

Wisconsin vs. Neraska, Gameday 2011

My first venture into the world of film photography. These are some pictures I took from the Wisconsin Nebraska Game when ESPN came to town. I shot, developed, and printed everything myself.

 

 

 

Student to Student: Jordan Kohout

I talked to defensive lineman Jordan Kohout about his academic life and the challenges facing student athletes.

Advertisers Ignore Millions of Viewers

Article: Women Comprise Large Part of the Sports Audience
 
Tom Van Riper, Forbes.com

Trucks, Wrangler Jeans, and Danica Patrick teasing to take her clothes off… If you watch football on Sunday’s you will see commercials for these products played ad nauseam, and the logic behind this practice is one of the basic laws of advertising – niche marketing.

Advertisers target programming for their commercials that they feel resonate with a specific audience. A show on Lifetime may be accompanied by commercials for dippers and JC Penny while the same show on FX may show commercials for ties and video games. In this vein, advertisers assume that men make up the vast majority of the sports watching population; therefore, both the products showcased and the way certain commodities are depicted reflect that assumption.

This logic, however, is not quite as hegemonic as advertisers make it seem.

According to a study by Tom Van Ripe of Forbes.com, “Females account for more than a third of 14 million-plus people that tune into major events like the NBA Finals, World Series, Daytona 500, and Stanley Cup Finals according to data from Nielsen Media Research.”

Even more impressive than this stat line, a whopping 45.9% of the 111 million viewers who tuned in to the Super Bowl in February were female. These more than 50 million women tuned in to watch the game for sure, but they were also treated to a healthy does of commercials depicting men eating pizza, men going to bars, men driving cars, men playing fantasy football, men eating Doritos, Fritos, Cheetos, and grilling an assortment of brats and burgers on stainless steel grills.

Women make up a larger than expected proportion of the population watching sports, particularly the Big Three of football, baseball, and basketball, but advertising continues to reflect the age old ideology of sports as being a male-oriented cult.

So what does this mean for niche marketing? Are advertisers failing to capitalize on a a fairly substantial female, sports-watching population by not throwing in a tampon commercial between ones about big, beefy trucks?

Not necessarily. As Stephen Master, head of Neilson Sports, points out, “The mass audience for big sports events tends to cater to mass consumer goods, many of which can appeal to both sexes. Those Budweiser ads are aimed at men. But with women in charge of the grocery shopping in most households.”

Master’s point is certainly true, but brushes past what I find to be the core of the problem with advertising during major sporting events – even for mass consumer products, they fall far short of the line I would consider to be gender neutral.

Take this Miller Light commercial for example.

Miller Light Unmanly Choice Commercial 

In the spot, a team of busty bathing-suit clad women “rescue” someone from the “unmanly” decision of drinking a light beer that isn’t Miller Light. Beer would be considered a commercial product, as it is something both women and men enjoy. This commercial, however, targets a specifically male audience by using sexy women to paint the picture of drinking Miller Light as manly.

While this commercial is only one example, the fact remains that if women make up millions of viewers and, as Master’s depicts, are the ones “buying the groceries,” why do advertisements for commercial products like Pizza Hut, Coors Light, and Buffalo Wild Wings continue to either objectify or omit women entirely?

The reason is simple. Advertisers still believe the in hegemonic notion of sports consumption as a strictly “male thing to do,” and despite the fact that women – particularly since the 1990‘s – have rapidly closed the gender gap, advertisers view the pairing of men and sports as something common sense, and commercial’s content, not necessarily the products themselves, reflect this.

A football game is not the place for strictly female-oriented advertising, but as the Neilson ratings point out, it is not the place for strictly male dominated commercials either. If advertising truly wanted to target the audience tuning into the programming, they should neutralize their advertising campaigns.