One can envision a fall television schedule that sees the Masters, NBA playoffs and NHL playoffs all going head-to-head for viewers and ad dollars. The traditional timing of football seasons will further disperse viewers.getty images
The best-case scenario has sports starting up again in the late summer or early fall, which will create a glut of high-end games from September to October.
Imagine the NFL, college football and the MLB postseason competing for viewers with the NBA and NHL playoffs, major golf championships, top tennis tournaments and Triple Crown horse races.
The situation is set up to be a great one for TV viewers; not so much for the networks that likely will see ad rates dwindle in such a crowded marketplace.
Having so many big-time sports on at once will spread viewership across many different networks, which would make it difficult for the networks to hit the ratings guarantees that typically are part of their ad contracts.
In addition, Fox Sports released some of their advertisers from their ad commitments during the coronavirus pandemic with the expectation that they will be pushed into the summer and fall when games return.
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I asked Seth Winter, Fox Sports executive vice president of sports sales, about the potential glut of sports programming in the fall, but he would not speculate, saying there are too many unknowns.
“We still don’t know when the advertisers are going to come back into the market,” Winter said. “We’re really not focused on that right now. We’re really focused on how we can communicate well with each other. … Everyone wants to plan for the future. There will be a future, I promise you that. There will be a lot of sports on the air.”
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I’ve been covering this beat for the better part of two decades. The sports ad sales marketplace early this year was as robust as I have ever seen it. Fox set a record for the earliest Super Bowl sellout, announcing in November that it had no more spots to sell. CBS and Turner sold out the NCAA Tournament in February — the earliest that event has sold out.
Winter is confident that sports ad sales will bounce back as soon as games are played.
“You have to remember, from an advertiser perspective, there was a massive migration to sports this year,” he said. “Even before we heard about the virus, we’d been in touch with a lot of agencies and clients — all of whom were planning to move even more of their investment to sports because of the continued deterioration of the entertainment genre. This is going to exacerbate it because you’re not going to have as much entertainment first-run programming on the broadcast network as you might have had in the fourth quarter under normal circumstances.”
I asked Winter about the message he’s been hearing from advertisers over the past month.
“They need help, and we’re there to help them,” Winter said. “It’s about taking a long-term view. If they’re hemorrhaging, we’re relieving them of their current obligations. What we’re asking them is — let’s not just obliterate their commitment. Let’s take it month by month and week by week.”
