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ESPN ready to celebrate out-of-home numbers

ESPN is a couple of weeks away from showing that its New Year’s Eve ratings around the College Football Playoff may not be as bad as they appear.

That’s because ESPN commissioned out-of-home studies from Nielsen and RealityMine’s USA TouchPoints that it says will put a number to all the people who watched the games in bars and restaurants. The results of those studies will be available in the next couple of weeks, said Artie Bulgrin, ESPN’s senior vice president of research and analytics.

ESPN expects two studies will put a number to those who watched New Year’s Eve games at bars and restaurants.
PhotoS by: ESPN IMAGES (2)
“We anticipated that there would be quite a bit out-of-home viewing, particularly in the evening while people are out at commercial establishments,” Bulgrin said. “We knew that New Year’s Eve was where there would be unusual behavior, whereas when we look at the audience on New Year’s Day, people pretty much are at home.”

The out-of-home numbers will help spin a more positive story from the CFP semifinals’ TV viewership, which was down

considerably. The 18.55 million viewers who watched Michigan State-Alabama was down 34 percent from last year for the Ohio State-Alabama game in prime time on New Year’s Day, and the 15.64 million viewers who watched Oklahoma-Clemson was off 44 percent from Oregon-FSU in the New Year’s Day late-afternoon slot. For the New Year’s Six games on ESPN, the network averaged 11.84 million viewers, down 19 percent from 14.68 million last year.

Several factors combined to keep the semifinal TV numbers down: The games were not competitive; excitement around this year’s semis was not as high as last year’s inaugural run; and the games were played on New Year’s Eve when fewer people watch television. Total TV usage during this year’s semifinals was down 16 percent compared with last year’s games that were played on New Year’s Day — one of the main reasons why viewership was off this year.

The out-of-home viewing undoubtedly will make ESPN’s New Year’s Eve ratings seem better. But Bulgrin said it’s too early to tell if they will be high enough to quiet the uproar among college football fans calling for college executives to move the semifinals off of New Year’s Eve.

Nielsen is able to come up with a figure by using its Portable People Meter technology, using the same panel it uses to measure national radio ratings. When Nielsen finalizes the numbers in a few weeks, ESPN will be able to put a number on how many people watched the games outside of their homes. ESPN then will use the USA TouchPoints data to show where these people watched the games.

“The combination of the two is going to allow us to paint the picture of what really happened on New Year’s Eve,” Bulgrin said.

While Nielsen has told TV networks that it plans to have its out-of-home measurement up-and-running by 2017, it quietly has been testing the out-of-home measurement system with ESPN for the past two months, measuring all programming on ESPN and ESPN2. Bulgrin would not say how much of a lift ESPN saw from the out-of-home viewing over the past two months, saying that the network and Nielsen still are evaluating the numbers.

“I can tell you that the lift that we’ve seen across our programming, according to Nielsen, has been significant,” Bulgrin said. “We’re encouraged by it.”

As a point of comparison, Bulgrin pointed to a similar study ESPN commissioned in 2010, when it covered the World Cup from South Africa. ESPN saw a 46 percent lift from its official TV ratings when it factored in digital and out-of-home viewing.

“We knew that there was going to be unusual behavior and we would have significant lift from out-of-home viewing,” he said.

John Ourand can be reached at jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Ourand_SBJ.

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