With baseball back and the NBA and NHL winding down their regular seasons, FOX Sports sales unit Home Team Sports hits the Spring armed with regional advertising opportunities around the country, repping a full house that includes FOX Sports Regional Networks (including YES Network), NBC SportsNets, AT&T SportsNets, MSG Networks, SNY, NESN, MASN, Altitude and more and offering digital media sponsorship of every MLB, NBA, and NHL home team in the country, reaching 90+ million homes with its platforms.
Cynopsis Sports asked Craig Sloan, EVP at Home Team Sports, about sales trends among RSNs, the baseball season and new brands entering the scene.
Sloan on ad trends: With declining ratings in many areas of primetime programming, advertisers were looking for additional reach vehicles to ensure they are finding new potential customers to increase revenues. For 2018, we worked with Nielsen to better articulate our mass reach across our various professional products (MLB, NBA, and NHL) and collegiate programming (primarily Big Ten, Pac 12, and ACC). We have found that in many cases, we’re able to reach a large unique audience that these advertisers were not able to get to through the top 15 or so broadcast and cable networks.
On brand partnerships: With time-shifted programming and long pod breaks in other parts of the TV landscape, brands are looking for the RSNs to deliver live, attentive audiences. Our research through many various vendors (Nielsen, SmithGeiger, and Ipsos) reveals that our passionate fans are deeply engaged into not just our content, but the brands that support this content— being twice as likely to trust, to purchase, to advocate for, and to stay loyal to – because these brands are supporting their beloved teams. Said differently, brands are looking to the RSNs for impact.
On the new MLB season: We are pacing slightly ahead of prior years from a strong early commitment by brands in last year’s broadcast upfront. Advertisers have begun to heed our message of committing early to ensure stable pricing and the highly coveted, in-game integrations that bring brands front and center into the amazing story lines that unfold each night. We have a few remaining positions available including our Statcast (new to our MLB coverage providing amazing player insights) and Replay Challenge enhancements. From April through September, fans spend more minutes watching MLB in our home team coverage than the top ten programs on TV… combined! With games on almost every night, MLB home team games are the driver of primetime audiences.
On new advertisers: We have a number of new partners this season on the MLB front. With an average of about 145 broadcasts per team (for all 29 US based teams), we have brands that are along for the entire ride while others come in and pulse according to their business objectives or key selling periods. We enjoy season long participation from MillerCoors, T-Mobile, Taco Bell, GEICO, and others who have taken integration positions inside of our coverage that enhance the fan experience by helping us provide deeper player insights and stronger statistical analysis. New to our MLB coverage this season are Humana, who is the Presenting Sponsor of our Opening Week coverage, as well as many others like US Army, Applebee’s, Mazda, Google, Amazon Prime Video, Arby’s, CDW, Dell and Capital One.
