Just over a week ago, Nielsen unveiled its annual list of trends and data sets for sport in 2016 as part of the annual Nielsen Year in Sports Media Report, examining the engagement with the Olympics, NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NASCAR, Indycar, UFC, soccer, golf, college sports and hockey. Nielsen Sports also broke out the science behind “what’s next,” as it relates to measuring fans’ consumption behavior, monetizing content across platforms and creating deeper partnerships across the sports ecosystem. Breakout conclusions included: Esports evolving from niche to mainstream; richer, deeper partnerships across the sports ecosystem built around content; OTT, social media and out-of-home viewing creating an omnichannel environment; edging closer to cracking the code on ROI; and data becoming driving force in optimizing fan relationships and maximizing revenue
Cynopsis Sports spoke with Stephen Master, Regional Head of Revenue for Nielsen Sports, about its report, changes in tackling audiences and the breakouts from 2016.
Master on 2016: This has been one of the most exciting sports years ever. You had the Cubs come back, you had the Cavaliers come back, you had the Patriots come back, Michael Phelps came back you had the NCAA basketball tournament decided on the last shot and the NCAA football championship decided on the last play. It was an incredible year for sports. So if you think about all of the turmoil going on in the political world, sports served as an escape for us with some many great iconic moments that we will be talking about for many years ahead.
On audiences: World Series Game 7 was the best it’s been in viewership in 25 years, NBA Game 7 drew the best since the Michael Jordon era. Others, such as the college football championship, were not quite what they were because of some changes in their programming but they still drew really big numbers. Even the Olympics, people will say that the average audience wasn’t what it was in London, but if you look at some of the big moments, they delivered some enormous numbers. Overall, what people weren’t saying was that the Olympics reached 198 million unique viewers across the nine television networks, and that doesn’t even include digital. In the NFL, there was so much debate about the ratings, but if you looked at it, after the election, they pretty much bounced back. So despite some of the noise about the decline, sports continued to show extremely strong results.
On the impact of cord-cutting: We are now in an era of counting total audience, so we are truly in an omni-channel environment. There are so many ways to stream the content, and what we are doing now here is to count those viewers who weren’t previously counted. The amount of time spent daily on a mobile device went from less than an hour two-years ago, and has now more than doubled, hitting over two hours and ten minutes, which is a significant portion of their day.
On approaching Hispanic viewership: It gets a lot into the segmentation, you can’t just say Hispanic is Hispanic is Hispanic. One of the biggest trends that we are seeing that is very applicable here, is that you need to take you fans and break them up into segments so that you can market to them differently. You can’t just lump women as a group, Hispanics as a group or young viewers as a group. They have all kinds of different behaviors and you can’t just say I’m going to target Hispanics. There are 50 million Hispanics in the US, so just saying you have a Hispanic strategy doesn’t work anymore.
On breakout sports in 2016: While traditional sports continue to do well, soccer and esports particularly had a good year. Major League Soccer continues to hit its stride, and they are really doing an amazing job in terms of expanding into new markets, really growing the game and getting people engaged. The MLS Cup saw a huge bump, getting over 2 million viewers in the US, which was a significant spike from 2015, in addition to a million and a half viewers in Canada. You also had the UEFA Champions League and Copa America, which saw close to nine million viewers for its final. The US didn’t even do very well in that tournament. I think soccer really has a tremendous upside at the moment.
