Cynopsis: Sports
10/01/12

Good morning. It’s Monday, October 1, 2012, and this is your first early morning Sports briefing. 

With a mantra to make it the “Year of the Fan,” Anheuser-Busch’s opening volley in Bud Light’s NFL sponsorship this season is already paying dividends. The brand is currently in the second year as the official beer sponsor of the NFL and created a season-long campaign this season with the theme “Year of the Fan.” The campaign is utilizing an average of two Bud Light spots in every game broadcast on ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, ESPN and NFL Network, as well as NFL and team-branded 12-packs of cans, a Facebook “Tickets for Life” promotion, and a new Bud Light Fantasy Football League, which engages consumers by allowing them to enter codes found on Bud Light bottles to compete in a fantasy football league.

Cynopsis Sports spoke with Mike Sundet, Vice President for Bud Light at Anheuser-Busch about the partnership with the NFL, the new campaign and the trouble with engagement.

Sundet on year one of the NFL deal: From marketing point of view, one of the things that is a goal with any marketing platform is that we develop and improve the health of our brands and how consumers perceive our brands. When we set out on our sponsorship with the NFL, one of the things we wanted to do was to focus on the fan. Bud Light is such a lifestyle brand anyway, it’s all about having good times with friends and the NFL sponsorship really gave us the opportunity to showcase that on a national level. We’ve done a lot of things with local team deals in the past-having sponsored 28 out of the 32 teams-but the NFL sponsorship gave us a national platform by which we could tell consumers our story. Last year was about focusing on the fan and giving fans experiences that only Bud Light could bring to the table as an official sponsor of the NFL. I think fans appreciated that when we looked back at the numbers.

On the strategy for year two: Since our brand is about fun and sociability, and we working with a popular sport like the NFL we are able to showcase the good times. So we built our marketing platform on the fan and around the fan, so we are doing a bunch of things this year. It starts with our creative. We have this campaign on TV that is about having fun with goofy, silly rituals that fans have when watching the game and we have some fun with that. The reaction has been great from consumers because everybody tells me what they do as a ritual or what their superstition is. It is important from a consumer standpoint to show that insight that we are not just out to utilize the NFL as a big corporate sponsor, it is really about showing the fun in an insightful way.

We’ve got retail programming in place, we’ve got the most extensive packaging platform that we’ve ever had with over 250 different NFL packages in the market right now. We have team-themed cans. We’ve got our fantasy football league, which is new for this year.

On the creation of the branded fantasy football league: The feedback has been great, we’ve got hundreds of thousands of fans interacting with the league, and it’s still early in the season. Fantasy football is something that millions and millions of people, myself included, play. But as a marketer, we struggle with how do we integrate our brand and create that engagement in a way that is very authentic and it’s been tough in the past. We’ve bought banner ads on some of the major fantasy sites. At Bud Light, we don’t have an awareness issue with the brand, but just putting up a banner ad doesn’t really say a lot about our brand. So we set out to create another opportunity for consumers to have fun with the NFL and that is what our league does. We have over a billion bottles in the market this football season and every bottle has a code on the back. It won’t stop people from signing up with other fantasy leagues but it does give them another way to interact with both Bud Light and the NFL throughout the season.

On the Air

The return of the referees following the NFL lockout, drove NFL Network’s Thursday Night Football game featuring a Baltimore win over Cleveland to an average of 8.1 million viewers, not including local stations in the two cities. That number ranks as the fifth most-watched game in the seven seasons of the channel’s franchise. Through three games of its newly expanded 13-game schedule, TNF is averaging a 5.0 household rating for a 39% markup over the network’s 2011 average and is on pace to rank as the highest-rated and most-watched Thursday Night Football season ever.

Today marks the launch of two new sports media brands in Time Warner Cable SportsNet/Time Warner Cable Deportes and Comcast SportsNet Houston. Time Warner’s English channel launch takes place tonight at 7p local time with a two-hour live special edition of the network’s signature show Access SportsNet that will feature Lakers Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard and Steve Nash and Galaxy superstar David Beckham as in-studio guests. The channel will serve as the exclusive local homes of the Los Angeles Lakers, LA Galaxy and LA Sparks games, as well as CIF (California Interscholastic Federation) high school regular season and playoff contests.

Meanwhile, Comcast SportsNet Houston will hit the airwaves at 5p local, and marks a partnership between the Houston Astros, Houston Rockets and the NBC Sports Group. The network opens with a brief introductory video that will showcase “the outlet’s passionate non-stop approach to local sports” and lead into SportsTalk Live, an analysis of the day’s top sports stories debated by a rotating panel of sports journalists, players, team officials and hosted by Kevin Eschenfelder. The inaugural show will include Astros General Manager Jeff Luhnow, Rockets point guard Jeremy Lin and Texans quarterback Matt Schaub.

ESPN announced that its Oct. 6 college football schedule will include Northwestern/Penn St. at noon, Georgia Tech/Clemson at 3:30p, Georgia/South Carolina at 7p and Washington/Oregon at 10:30p. College GameDay will originate from the South Carolina campus on Saturday, marking the sixth time the show has originated from Columbia. ABC will offer Nebraska/Ohio State at 8p.

Fresh off an intense Ryder Cup, Golf Channel announced that the network will re-air NBC’s weekend coverage of the 39th Ryder Cup Matches today and Tuesday. This evening, Golf Channel will air NBC’s Ryder Cup Day Two Afternoon Fourball matches from 8-11p and on Tuesday, the channel will run NBC’s Ryder Cup Final Day Singles Matches from 4-9p. Golf Channel will then debut a new season of Big Break Greenbrier tomorrow at 9p with The Glass Break challenge. This run marks the series’ 18th season, with a cast of 12 accomplished professional golfers competing for the opportunity to play the 2013 Greenbrier Classic on the PGA TOUR and $50,000 in cash.

NBA TV is going all in on NBA Media Day today starting at 2p, with the Eastern Conference show highlighting the Brooklyn Nets, New York Knicks, Chicago Bulls and Philadelphia 76ers. The Western Conference show at 4p, with live reports from the L.A. Lakers and Oklahoma City Thunder with additional coverage of the L.A. Clippers, San Antonio Spurs and Houston Rockets and others.

Cablevision inked a deal to bring Univision Deportes Network to the lineup where is will be made available to Optimum subscribers on channel 1065.

NBC Olympic President Gary Zenkel told conference attendees that the reason the company wasn’t offering more coverage of the Paralympics was that viewers and sponsors were both fatigued coming off the Olympics, according to The Guardian. Although NBCU platforms offered more coverage this year, he told attendees of the Royal Television Society’s Digital World Conference that the company would be more likely to offer more coverage is there was a bigger gap between the two events.

FIFA and Russia jointly announced the 11 cities in the country that had been selected to host 2018 World Cup matches. Locations will include Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Saransk, Samara, Yekaterinburg, Rostov-on-Don, Volgograd and Sochi.

An industry-wide collection of condolences were made on Friday when news surfaced that Chris Economaki, the Dean of American Motorsports Journalism, passed away Friday morning at the age of 91. Economaki had been synonymous with the sport and served as the editor for National Speed Sport News for 60 years, in addition to his roles as a track announcer and broadcaster on television and radio. “The passing of Chris Economaki is a tough loss for me on both a personal and professional level, having known Chris throughout my life,” said NASCAR Chairman And CEO Brian France. “Many people consider Chris the greatest motorsports journalist of all time. He was, indeed, ‘the Dean.’ Chris was a fixture for years at NASCAR events, and played a huge role in growing NASCAR’s popularity. I’ll miss seeing him and of course, I’ll miss hearing that voice. Our thoughts and prayers are with his daughters Corinne and Tina and the rest of Chris’ family.”

A CYNOPSIS MESSAGE

Don’t Forget to Nominate by November 1:
Cynopsis’ Most Intriguing People Awards

The Awards will shine a spotlight on the industry’s most fascinating individuals in the media industry, including TV networks, studios, stations, MSO’s, digital media companies, ad agencies, brand partners and any organization that is involved with TV and online video entertainment. (Submit Online Now)

AWARDS GALA: Spring 2013

Nomination Questions: Jenn Sredzinski | Ad/Sponsorship Info: Mike Farina.

Sponsorship & Promotion

Univision Deportes launched the channel’s first-ever branded sports program Fanaticos del Frio (Fans of the Cold) that will be sponsored by Coors Light. The series is set to feature the latest news and information on Liga MX, the premier soccer league in Mexico. Hosted by Alejandro Berry and Jorge Calvo, the show will air monthly on Univision Deportes Network. The series will also feature Ms. CoolCast, the official hostess of Coors Light, as she meets fans at Liga MX matches to showcase their perspectives.

Branded entertainment company Big Tent Entertainment is bringing viral sensation Domo to the major leagues via a new licensing agreement with Plushland. The long-term deal will see a line of branded plush featuring Domo decked out in the country’s top colleges, MLB and NHL team logos and will be out starting in spring 2013.

Digital Fields

GorillaSpot Media unveiled its mobile app, Cliptamatic. That gives iPhone users the ability to discover and share short clips from popular entertainment and news across their social graph. Initial Cliptamatic content will come from the Big Ten Network, with game highlights added in from each team’s weekly football games.

The Main Event

Bears/Cowboys at 8:30 on ESPN.

A CYNOPSIS MESSAGE

ON THIS DAY in 1961: Roger Maris breaks the home-run record.

Answer to Our Last Sports Trivia Question: Who is the only athlete to have won the World Series Most Valuable Player Award as a member of two different teams? Reggie Jackson won it with the Oakland A’s in 1973 and the New York Yankees in 1977. Kudos: Phyllis McQuillan-MSG Media/NY; Michael Ritz-BucStar Consulting/NY; Pete Gautieri-AE Networks/NY; Daniel Weber- Nat Geo TV/NY; Synda Kollman-Charter Marketing Group/Boca Raton; Tony Ferranti-MMSI/Warwick; Peter SP Gimber-WBZ-TV & myTV38/Boston; Matt Deprey-Discovery Communications/Silver Spring; Steve McNair-CBS Radio Houston/Houston; Ron Salcedo-Zimmerman/Nashville; David Hauptman/Denver; Joe Pedri-KLAS-TV/Las.Vegas; Miriam Aardahl-OMD/LA; Justin Stockton-Muve Music/San Diego; Nick Monroe-Monroe Photography/San Diego.

In The Know: Last year, Drew Brees broke the NFL record for yards passing in a season. Who previously held the record? (Email [email protected] with your answer and be sure to include your name, company, city and time zone. Unofficial rules: Only the second four correct answers from each time zone will be mentioned; and once you’ve been mentioned in any of the Cynopsis editions, you can’t be mentioned again that calendar week.)

Later — Chris
Chris Pursell for Cynopsis | Sports
10.01.12

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