Given the glut of big-time sports that are planning to take place this fall, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the TV marketplace will tilt heavily toward the advertisers.
That thinking would be wrong.
In a normal TV ad sales marketplace, if prices for, say, the NFL are too high, advertisers could move their money to college football, the NBA playoffs, MLB playoffs, NHL playoffs, golf or tennis majors, Triple Crown races — you name it. Typically, that kind of competition should bring prices down.
Such a scenario is not playing out at all. Advertisers are finding the market tighter than ever for a couple of reasons.
The biggest reason comes down to, simply, scarcity. Take MLB, for example, which compressed its 162-game season into just 60 games. Fox Sports went into the season with its MLB schedule 90% sold.
Much of the MLB inventory is taken by advertisers that bought schedules before the pandemic forced a truncated season.
Another reason comes from the continuing decline of entertainment programming, which typically competes with sports programming for ad dollars. “Water cooler” talk during the pandemic has centered on what shows people stream on Netflix, not on the programming networks are running in prime time.
“One of the mistakes that we make in assessing the marketplace is that we tend to look at the sports marketplace,” said Seth Winter, executive vice president of sports sales for Fox Sports. “There may be more GRPs (gross ratings points) in the marketplace in sports. But it doesn’t even compensate for the loss of GRPs in entertainment. People are really watching entertainment on more subscription services than ever before.”
Home Team Sports Executive Vice President Craig Sloan, who sells national advertising across the country’s regional sports networks, sounded the same theme.
“It’s crazy to say this, but right now things look pretty healthy,” he said. “It’s hard to know whether it’s for the entire ecosystem of entertainment, news and sports or whether it’s just a sign of the fact that advertisers are realizing that people watch Netflix and live sports.”
