German legislation and the dominance of football makes it difficult to sell commercial packages for broadcasts of summer sporting events, according to AS&S Sports Marketing Dir Michael Lina. AS&S is the marketing arm of German broadcaster ARD. Every two years the core Olympic sports have to go head-to-head against a FIFA World Cup or UEFA Euro, and, Lina said, it is next to impossible to break through the dominance of football. To combat this trend, Lina said that AS&S is trying to sell the whole summer season to potential sponsors as opposed to selling the individual sports. Average viewership numbers for summer sporting events range between 600,000 to 800,000 viewers on a given Saturday. While those viewership numbers certainly do not help, German legislation which prohibits public broadcasters from offering advertisement packages for sports broadcasts on Sundays makes it even harder, especially considering that the majority of such events take place on the weekends. “There are exceptions to this legislation, and I guess it’s just typical German, as those exceptions are football, football, football, and Olympic Games. That’s it,” Lina said. “Everything else has to make it without this platform, and as a result we don’t have a program sponsor.”
TAKING IT AS WHOLE: Despite those limitations, there is a bright side, Lina said. He said that if you take the whole summer period, several months and independent from the individual sport, then you would be able to reach a convincing contact figure -- 19 million unique viewers. The numbers mean that it is not the same viewer watching a particular sports broadcast week in and week out, but 19 million individual viewers. To put this number into perspective, the FIFA World Cup had around 66 million unique viewers, including a potential market share of 92%. The potential market share means that at least 92% of the German TV audience tuned in to the World Cup at some point. For winter sports those numbers are 44 million and 60%. Lina said that taking those numbers into account, summer sports are a very good communications platform and well worth the investment. He added that TV viewership in general goes down during the summer months. The same is true for ad spending on German TV. It is significantly lower in June and July, the two months when the majority of summer sporting events take place. As a result it is much easier for a potential sponsor to achieve a higher share of voice during the summer months. “While summer sports are fighting for awareness, they are nevertheless a suitable sponsorship platform," he said. "You only have to take summer sports as a whole.” Another aspect that could be attractive to potential sponsors is the target audience. Lina: “Track and field audiences are generally more family-oriented, and are very interesting in terms of socio-economic factors such as household income, level of education and so on.”
