The Super Bowl Loses Money Every Year
In Super Bowl Media Day, I learned that the NFL would not release the TV ratings for Super Bowl 2020. The only current publicly released information came from Nielsen, which had their report for the end of Super Bowl 2020.
So, what happened to the Nielsen data for Super Bowl 2020? Did the league decide to use it as political fodder for potential lawsuits? No, one would guess the answer to that question.
Actually, the company’s website was hacked and all the information leaked onto the internet. Then it all went down for a few hours as the company rushed to restore the pages. So you can imagine the confusion when you clicked on the Nielsen website, found that all the information was there, but none of it listed the demographics of the viewers.
When you get right down to it, the most important numbers to know in marketing your product or service is the demographic statistics. However, the NFL, a league of sports fans, does not market itself or its product to everyone. It’s marketed to a very specific audience who wants to watch something exciting.
If those numbers are not there, it is impossible to make informed marketing decisions and to determine if they will be returning viewers in the future. The company with the best current viewers in the world can still lose money with very little of the target audience returning. That would be a tragedy if you were the team with a new jersey on the field.
So the NFL got smart and the media didn’t leak the Nielsen numbers for Super Bowl 2020. They did tell me that they are in a better place than they were in 2020 and that they expect a much larger audience.
They also told me that they expect to be much more aggressive in doing their product promotions and marketing for future reports. Indeed, they seem to be very happy with the current Super Bowl viewership figures and they are still in the planning stages of Super Bowl 2020. And in the past, they have been very aggressive in pushing their players and products.
They are not stupid and, if they are thinking about lawsuits, they will never mention it in their annual meetings with the media day at the Super Bowl. They are far too smart to do that. Please consider this in 2020.
