A little more than two years ago, when Neil Mulcahy first started selling for Fox Sports, he had a conversation with Fox Sports Chairman David Hill that left a big impression.
Mulcahy, who is now executive vice president of Fox Sports Sales, was trying to persuade Hill to give one of his advertisers an enhancement in the broadcast.
“David, I know this is church and state,” Mulcahy said, referring to the traditional split between production and sales.
Hill stopped him dead in his tracks.
“We are all church here,” he told Mulcahy. “If there’s something you need done or helps your process, then that’s something that we should all do together because it will help all of our processes.”
Mulcahy remembered that conversation early last year as he was preparing to sell the Super Bowl, an event that had become a tough sell over the past several years.
Neil Mulcahy said a challenging market-
place forced Fox to adjust its selling
approach.
In the last two years, in particular, advertisers dragged their feet for a number of reasons. Postgame ad meters that rank the game’s commercials from the best to the worst scared off some advertisers. Similarly, movie companies did not show up, deciding that the Super Bowl was not the best way to launch a campaign.
And with Fox setting prices for 30-second spots at a record high of $2.7 million this year, the network figured it had to change the traditional selling approach for its ad inventory.
“Given what had happened the last couple of years in sales, we were quite nervous,” Mulcahy said.
Adding to Mulcahy’s nervousness was the fact that Fox was selling this year’s game without Jim Burnette, Fox’s legendary ad sales executive who retired in November.
Ad buyers noted, however, that the change was seamless.
“Neil has maintained the tradition of Fox Sports Sales, always keeping the big picture in mind,” said Tony Ponturo, vice president of global media and sports marketing for Anheuser-Busch, which annually is the biggest Super Bowl advertiser. “Neil is a listener. He will hear you out and try to find the decision that will help his advertising partner and Fox.”
Mulcahy used those listening skills to develop a sales strategy with his team, which includes Senior Vice President Steve McKiernan and vice presidents Mark Evans and Rick Kloiber.
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“We tried to quell some of the fears that people had in the past by giving them added value,” Mulcahy said.
One of those fears dealt with the ad meter. Marketers don’t want to be embarrassed and have been scared away by the potentially negative impact of having their ad voted as one of the worst. So Fox signed an agreement with MySpace that will house advertisers’ commercials and provide links on the MySpace Web site for viewers who want to see the commercials again.
Fox then decided to take on the movie business, which essentially had stayed away from the past couple of Super Bowls. Fox decided to hire Ryan Seacrest to host a red carpet event around the game. Hollywood studios that buy Super Bowl spots would ensure that Seacrest would interview the film’s star before the game.
“We have two different things — along with the power of the Super Bowl,” Mulcahy said. “Basically, I just went on the road for a few months with our sales guys. We realized these were adding to the excitement and getting people to talk about the Super Bowl and the power of it.”
Thanks largely to those two innovations, Fox enjoyed the most robust ad marketplace since the 2000 Super Bowl, when a spate of dot-com companies made big buys.
The network went into the World Series in October with only a handful of Super Bowl spots left. Going into last week, the network only had one spot left — at the two-minute warning in the fourth quarter.
“It’s a sales effort, but it’s a sales effort that if you start early enough, you hope that you get yourself well sold enough so that you’re not going into January with a huge amount of units.”
The market for this year’s Super Bowl also has been helped by the writers strike, which has left advertisers with fewer places to go.
“The writers strike probably came into play with the last 15 percent or so,” Mulcahy said. “When people started realizing that there weren’t going to be as many alternatives in the first quarter. By the time the writers strike happened, we were pretty much done.”
