NFL President of Digital Media and NFL Network President Mary Ann Turcke at the NeuLion Sports Media & Technology conference shared her vision for the future of football consumption and talked about pressing issues such as sliding ratings, kneeling players and finding fans on different devices and platforms. Turcke said the recent ratings slide for NFL games overall is not too worrisome or out of the norm as TV viewership overall declines. “People using TVs is down 4% in the country, our ratings are down 5%,” she said. “Our content is more popular relative to prime time viewing than it was last year, but, honestly, superstar players go down (to injury) and it’s a four-point swing. The matchups become blowouts by halftime and you lose ratings.” She pointed to (ratings) gains in "MNF" and "TNF," with "SNF" flat to down, but admits there is work to do on Sunday afternoons: “We can’t discount the fact if a game becomes too big of a spread, you’re not competing against somebody else’s grid, people can watch ‘Game of Thrones’ or ‘Stranger Things.’ We’re in trench warfare for fans. We’re not competing just against sports but against some of the best entertainment content created in history.”
HOT TOPICS: “The question of the year is the anthem protests and what’s going on there,” Turcke said. “You read it and see it and there are people angry on both sides. It’s very tricky. It’s having an impact. I don’t think when you look at structural declines it’s having a huge impact on ratings. I think we have work to do. We are trying to work with players to get at these issues they’re protesting.” Turcke flatly dismissed the idea that too much football on the air hurts ratings: “MLB has over 2,400 games, the NBA has over 1,200 games, we have 256. We’re the definition of scarcity. It’s one of the reasons we’re so popular. The average American may only get exposed to 100 games.”
GETTING MORE SOCIAL: Turcke acknowledged the league needs to step up its social media game to match outreach by rival leagues. “I saw the NBA being ahead of us in terms of making players superstars,” she said. “We did a Snapchat story on Deshaun Watson. We’re experimenting a lot.” She pointed to a few high-profile examples where NFL players are succeeding in social, including Tom Brady’s promotion of his TB12 brand and J.J. Watt’s fundraising in the aftermath of Houston’s flooding from Hurricane Harvey. Turcke said the NFL is trying to reach a younger demographic with its ad campaigns for Thursday night and also with its "Good Morning Football" show on NFL Network. She also said Amazon is a good platform to reach young viewers, and quipped, “Millennials at some point will have a mortgage and kids and they’ll figure out television is a cheap form of entertainment. Redzone is a good product for them.”
HERE COMES THE FUTURE: The trends that Turcke is watching most closely include cord cutting and consolidation among media companies. She called out the Time Warner-AT&T deal and the recent stories indicating Disney may buy some assets from Fox: “When you see more consolidation like that you start to think about who are the viable bidders of your content going forward. If you lose bidders out of the market, that is something that should keep us awake at night.” Looking ahead, Turcke says she sees more fans consuming NFL content on global social platforms and in curated newsfeeds: “For me it’s about the most fans, keeping fans engaged, be where they want to be and have content the way they want to consume it and then monetize around that. Your news feed on Facebook should be curated to who’s your favorite team or who your fantasy team is.”
