Menu
Media

A year in, USA Today group hitting its marks

In a little more than a year, USA Today Sports Media Group says it’s achieving the reach, relevance and ad dollars envisioned at startup in late 2011.

Through acquisition of sites like The Big Lead, and with accelerated traffic from last summer’s Olympic Games, USA Today Sports reached a new high in online traffic and has maintained momentum. In February 2012, USA Today and associated sites moved into the top five of comScore rankings for sports sites for the first time, hitting No. 4 with 24.2 million unique visitors. The group hasn’t dropped out of the top five since. Before the aggregation, it ranked outside the top 10, with a little over half of that traffic.

“Overall digital traffic is up 120 percent year over year,” said USA Today Sports Media Group President Tom Beusse. “Clearly a fair amount of that was through acquisition, but we’ve also relaunched and grown traffic on USATodaysports.com by 100 percent. More importantly, we’ve shown that the USA Today Sports brand can be leveraged as marketing assets, which was our goal from the outset.” He went on to add, with a laugh, “As for revenues, they have increased by a significant number and if that weren’t true, I wouldn’t be here.’’

Advertising and marketing alliances with large properties, including the PGA Tour, NASCAR, Churchill Downs and a pending three-year deal with the UFC, have helped build out content and drive advertising revenue. League and property relations, and custom promotions and events, now drive more than a third of the revenue for the Sports Media Group.

A prime example is the relationship with NASCAR, now extended to a three-year deal from its one-year test run, under which Mobil 1 will be presenting sponsor of preview coverage of each NASCAR race every Friday in USA Today Sports. In another case, Anheuser-Busch is sponsoring a multiplatform “Road to the Kentucky Derby’’ series, created under the Churchill Downs partnership.

“We never had league relationships on the business side here, so they have been real door openers for us and made our brand relevant from a sports business standpoint,” said Merrill Squires, senior vice president and head of sports marketing and partnerships at USA Today Sports Media Group.

Another charge for the group was to create new properties from existing assets. Toward that end, the celebrated, if aging, USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter was tweaked to make it digital and consumer-facing, with a vote of 1,000 online panelists. That change attracted Chrysler as an advertiser. USA Today is now looking at expanding the Ad Meter to other big events, and at some possible on-site experiential extensions.

Gatorade’s sponsorship of USA Today’s High School Sports Super 25 is another recent example.

In its second year, Beusse says the focus will be on continuing to meld Gannett’s local and national media properties. In addition, they are looking at further integration of video into digital content, where there has already been content marketing assignments underwritten by Under Armour and DirecTV. Finally, he pointed to a continued push against the growing legions of displaced fans, where “we have the local credibility and national reach to service that group that can’t get enough content.”

SBJ Morning Buzzcast: March 25, 2024

NFL meeting preview; MLB's opening week ad effort and remembering Peter Angelos.

Big Get Jay Wright, March Madness is upon us and ESPN locks up CFP

On this week’s pod, our Big Get is CBS Sports college basketball analyst Jay Wright. The NCAA Championship-winning coach shares his insight with SBJ’s Austin Karp on key hoops issues and why being well dressed is an important part of his success. Also on the show, Poynter Institute senior writer Tom Jones shares who he has up and who is down in sports media. Later, SBJ’s Ben Portnoy talks the latest on ESPN’s CFP extension and who CBS, TNT Sports and ESPN need to make deep runs in the men’s and women's NCAA basketball tournaments.

SBJ I Factor: Nana-Yaw Asamoah

SBJ I Factor features an interview with AMB Sports and Entertainment Chief Commercial Office Nana-Yaw Asamoah. Asamoah, who moved over to AMBSE last year after 14 years at the NFL, talks with SBJ’s Ben Fischer about how his role model parents and older sisters pushed him to shrive, how the power of lifelong learning fuels successful people, and why AMBSE was an opportunity he could not pass up. Asamoah is 2021 SBJ Forty Under 40 honoree. SBJ I Factor is a monthly podcast offering interviews with sports executives who have been recipients of one of the magazine’s awards.

Shareable URL copied to clipboard!

https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2013/03/11/Media/USA-Today.aspx

Sorry, something went wrong with the copy but here is the link for you.

https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2013/03/11/Media/USA-Today.aspx

CLOSE