Baseball is back and Home Team Sports is once again serving up partnership opportunities with RSNs throughout the country, with the sales unit of FOX Sports offering advertisers “build-your-own”, scalable branding opportunities for TV, mobile, and digital media sponsorships for all MLB home teams in the U.S., reaching every DMA across the country. Cynopsis Sports asked Craig Sloan, EVP at Home Team Sports, about the marketplace as MLB gets underway, discussing new brands entering the scene as well as the future of the RSN industry.
Sloan on 2018: Thankfully, the 2018 MLB season had so many tremendous story-lines with high-profile young stars leading the way to another hotly contested September playoff push. While it was a successful campaign, we added to our Insights team in staffing size and depth of information to allow us to relay an unprecedented story of engagement and scale with a series of proprietary research studies.
On momentum: We made a concerted effort this off-season to secure 85% or more of our sponsor targets before Opening Day. We’ve overachieved our goals with all top 25 partners from last season returning and a host of new sponsors coming aboard including TruGreen, Google, and Door Dash. We expect strong ratings across the country as interest is piquing with some major stars moving markets like Harper and Machado as well the most marketable players in the game all under 30 years old (Trout, Judge, Bryant, Arenado, Yelich, Acura, and Betts).
On trends: There is a clear recognition from the client and agency world that the TV landscape is setting up into a VOD and Live marketplace. We have more brands, locally and nationally, leaning into our home team model because it provides live, large audience with unique reach and industry high unaided recall. Brands are enthused by our short pod breaks where 90% of our in-game breaks are 2 minutes or less— often with only 3 advertisers.
On new categories and clients: We have had a significant uptick in partners from the financial services / banking category, including our new Opening Week partner, TD Ameritrade. We have provided TD Ameritrade with an elevated presence on-air as well as created multiple pieces of custom short-form content that will appear across all of our platforms. And we are seeing even more interest from the highly competitive wireless/telecom and QSR categories. Overall, we have managed to create a very balanced advertising sponsor portfolio with a mix of season long participants like MillerCoors, TMobile, and Taco Bell— while others that are taking strong positions for key distinct periods from April through September like Scotts, Apple, and Amazon.
On the future: Every year, with our consistent delivery and the decline of available prime-time GRPs, our content becomes a larger and larger percentage of the available key A18-49 demographic impressions. Fans will again spend more minutes watching home team baseball this summer than any other program on television. The home team model remains immune to many of the challenges facing many other sectors of the linear landscape. Simply stated, as examples, nothing will get between a Yankees fan in NY, a Red Sox fan in Boston, or an Cardinals fan in St. Louis. Because of those factors, we see brands evolving, or growing, by getting further into our in-market streaming, highlights, and social/mobile platforms to extend their reach to these passionate fans. Our fans have an insatiable appetite for content around their beloved players and teams and we’re serving up more ways for a brand to join that intersection each and every year.
