Though David Hill was the brains behind all of the events that were part of Fox Sports’ “Championship Season,” his year is defined by the wild success his network experienced with the Super Bowl.
TV innovations, starting with the Fox Box and ending with the Gopher Cam, born from Hill’s imagination.
Super Bowl red carpet may not have brought advertisers into the game, but it made the ones that came feel better about their decision.
Though the Super Bowl always commands the biggest paycheck in sports, it had become a tough sell in the past two years, when ABC and CBS each went into the week before the game with spots still available.
Enter Hill and Fox, who sold out their Super Bowl inventory in record time. By early November, the broadcaster was reporting a near sellout, with some of the last spots approaching a record high $3 million per 30-second spot.
Nobody is suggesting that Hill is solely responsible for the successful ad market. Fox’s gains were a product of good fortune as much as anything else. Some observers suggest that Fox’s ad sales effort mostly was helped by movie companies that had more male-oriented films to hype than in past years.
WHAT PEOPLE
ARE SAYING:
“When David walks into a room, all eyes follow him, waiting to see what he’s going to say.”
JIMMY BURNETTE
Former ad sales chief, Fox
Still, it’s undeniable that Hill created an environment that helped advertisers feel good about their purchase. To help give movie companies additional value, Hill set up a red carpet during the pregame show, where the stars of those films could be interviewed by Ryan Seacrest.
Hill said he came up with the idea when he attended Super Bowl viewing parties in previous years, where he noticed that nobody was paying attention to the pregame show because they were socializing.
“No one’s sitting there riveted to every syllable that we say. Last year, the TV was in the corner, and it might as well have been broadcasting in Urdu,” Hill said from a Fox production truck two days before this year’s game. “How do you get people to watch? You put a personality on, like Ryan Seacrest, and say, ‘Watch this.’ It’s new and it’s different. They’re going to watch. If they like it, they’ll watch a bit more.”
Hill’s genius — and that’s the term used by anybody who has ever worked with the former rugger from Australia — is his ability to bring innovations to TV sports, starting in 1994 with the “Fox Box,” where the score is always on screen.
One of Hill’s most recent on-screen innovations made its debut during this year’s Daytona 500, with “Gopher Cam,” which is a camera embedded in the track.
Fox Sports President Ed Goren says the network has had that camera for several years. But it wasn’t until Hill decided to call it “Gopher Cam” — complete with a cartoon gopher — that the public started to take notice. Fox now sells “Gopher Cam” merchandise, from T-shirts to baseball caps to plush toys.
“We must have had 2 million votes come in when we asked what they wanted to name this stupid camera,” Goren said.
It’s hard to talk about Hill’s year without taking into account his entire career, where he is one of the most respected executives around. When a reporter asked Comcast Programming President Jeff Shell why he hired Jamie Davis to run Versus, Shell responded, “He learned from the master,” referring to Davis’ stint working with Hill at Fox in the mid-1990s.
Similarly, Fox’s former ad sales chief, Jimmy Burnette, spoke of how Hill has become a sports media brand in his own right, known for producing big events flawlessly. That’s why it made sense for Hill to tie all of Fox’s big events last season into one “Championship Season” for the broadcaster.
“He has that charisma,” Burnette said. “When David walks into a room, all eyes follow him, waiting to see what he’s going to say.”
