This year’s College Football Playoff championship game had the makings of a major motion picture. A sequel to last year’s matchup between Clemson and Alabama provided the opportunity for redemption. It was a thrilling contest with trick plays, a key injury, lead changes and a last second victory by the Tigers.
So why were the ratings for the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) most important game down for the second straight year? It’s a question that becomes even more confusing when considering that the two semifinal games airing on New Year’s Eve saw a lift in ratings, even though both were blowouts. One major difference is that this holiday was on a Saturday and the national championship game came on a Monday night. Games played on a Saturday or a holiday cast a wider net by capturing more of the casual college football audience.
Keeping with this logic, the college playoff’s management committee has opted to move future New Year’s Eve semifinal games that fall on weekdays to Saturdays in 2018, 2019, 2024 and 2025 to maximize ratings potential with its 12-year ESPN broadcast contract. One exception is the semifinal game on Friday,
Read MoreThis year’s College Football Playoff championship game had the makings of a major motion picture. A sequel to last year’s matchup between Clemson and Alabama provided the opportunity for redemption. It was a thrilling contest with trick plays, a key injury, lead changes and a last second victory by the Tigers.
So why were the ratings for the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) most important game down for the second straight year? It’s a question that becomes even more confusing when considering that the two semifinal games airing on New Year’s Eve saw a lift in ratings, even though both were blowouts. One major difference is that this holiday was on a Saturday and the national championship game came on a Monday night. Games played on a Saturday or a holiday cast a wider net by capturing more of the casual college football audience.
Keeping with this logic, the college playoff’s management committee has opted to move future New Year’s Eve semifinal games that fall on weekdays to Saturdays in 2018, 2019, 2024 and 2025 to maximize ratings potential with its 12-year ESPN broadcast contract. One exception is the semifinal game on Friday, Dec. 31, 2021, which is a federally observed holiday. With that said, it seems obvious that the same scheduling adjustment should be considered for the championship game as well. However, as it currently stands, it does not appear that the NCAA will heed this advice.
But beyond ratings and timing, why should brands care about this environment? A recent Nielsen research study found “more than 159 million people tuned in to at least one minute of a college football game during the 2016 regular season alone—about a 3 percent increase over the regular 2015 college football season.” That number represents just over half of the U.S. TV population. The sport’s popularity is also fairly balanced across the U.S. with some pockets of high concentration in areas that have historically successful football teams in the South and Midwest. Not only is this audience geographically expansive, it is also inclusive across age segments, genders and ethnicities. As if that wasn’t already ideal, the college football fan base skews toward a more affluent and educated audience.
In other words, for advertisers looking to reach a TV viewing audience in a live and engaged format, college football may be considered a crucial element for their media strategy. Top national advertisers AT&T, Chick-Fil-A, Taco Bell, Nissan and Geico are spending millions of dollars to sponsor college football. Common sense would suggest that these brands do not need to target an affluent audience, but the reach of this group and their demographic comprehensiveness makes them supremely attractive. It is also to keep in mind that the sponsorship investment levels are much more attainable for college football when compared to the king of the pigskin, the NFL.
Furthermore, advertisers are trying to connect with TV viewing audiences that are simultaneously engaging with social media through a second screen. Nielsen is able to measure and aggregate social media mentions across Facebook and Twitter to identify how audiences are engaging with both live TV and after a program has concluded. According to some of their recent findings, 58 percent of people who used their smartphone while watching TV also went on to Facebook during this time. This audience is doing more than just scrolling through their feed liking photos of people’s babies they’ve never met. They are posting, commenting and sharing content related to TV programming—and college football viewers are no different.
Nielsen data shows that Facebook’s highest concentration of TV-related posts occur on Saturdays at 4.8 times the average, which also happens to be one of the College Football Playoff’s primetime days for matchups. On Twitter, athletes tweeting from their owned handles about TV generate some of the highest engagement levels at 115 times the average. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the highest engagements per TV-related tweets for sports occur at the end of the game through the next hour.
So what does all of this data and insight mean? While the College Football Playoffs may have some ground to gain in the ratings department, they still hold control of a captive and diverse audience that interacts with one another across a plethora of platforms. Because of these strengths, it should earn high marks from any marketer looking for an engaged live audience.