Courtesy Media Life Magazine

(November 17, 2009) There’s something magical about spending a summer afternoon working in the yard with the radio tuned to the local sports station as your favorite baseball team takes on their longtime rivals in a mid-season match-up.

Or is there?

For years radio sellers touted that magical feeling to fetch higher ad rates for play-by-play sports broadcasts.

There was a bit of rah-rah to it, supporting the home team and all that, but the big selling point was that lots of folks much like yourself tuned in for the games. Sports play-by-play drew big ratings.

But did they?

No one really knew, since it was difficult to track ratings for individual games under the old Arbitron diary system, let alone see how a team did over a full season.

Enter the Portable People Meter, and all that changes. With the PPM, which delivers so much more data, it’s possible to look at the ratings for each game individually and to accurately average the ratings of game broadcasts even across a season.

And as it turns out, ratings aren’t as high as so many people thought.

For some big games, it’s true ratings will shoot way up. But for others they’ll be well down, perhaps averaging what the station would do airing music or other non-sports entertainment, such that over a full season of play-by-play coverage average ratings will be lower.

The result is that the rates stations fetch for their live sports coverage have gone down, and significantly, perhaps 20 percent to 30 percent, and even more in some cases, according to industry sources.

There are some in sports media who think the better, more accurate PPM data is all for the good, even if it means stations can’t get the rates they used to.

One is Bob Snyder, principle of Snyder Sports Audio, which consults sports radio stations and sports franchises on ad sales. He believes the more reliable data serves to build credibility with advertisers and agencies, making sports play-by-play broadcasts that much more attractive for advertising.

But others contend the numbers don’t tell the whole story when it comes to play-by-play sports.

Tim McCarthy, senior vice president of radio at ESPN, argues that overworked buyers, facing pressure from customers to get the best deal, end up simply looking at the numbers and fail to take into account the unique, passionate audience the broadcasts deliver.

“What’s the value of a Yankees/Red Sox game or a Bears/Packers game? These are rivalries that have packed arenas for years. They have value. To say no one cares is not true.”

The problem longer-term, of course, is that stations are seeing less ad revenue from broadcast rights they agreed to pay big dollars for before the PPM came along and deflated their value.

Those deals, though no longer profitable, are still in place. As Don Martin, vice president and general manager of Fox Sports Radio, notes, they still have value in cementing a sports stations' position in the market, but they can create a real problem for a station's bottom line.

Says Martin: "You have to keep the costs of those rights in check or it can cause your station to hemorrhage cash."

blog comments powered by Disqus

Accelerate Your Sports Broadcasting Career

Meet Employers

Secrets Revealed

Radio Demos, Resumes

TV Demos, Resumes

Sports Broadcasting Books

Sportscastings Jobs

Show Prep Links