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Why Cumulative TV Audiences Don't Add Up
There's strength in numbers. It's an expression we've all heard many times and in different situations. One of those situations involves a rights seller telling a potential sponsor that the scale of his or her property's cumulative television audience cannot be matched. But is there really strength in numbers as they relate to televised events? Such numbers wow many of potential sponsors, primarily because they are advertising people who think in terms of ratings. The problem is that not all television viewers are the same. They think about the property differently and their viewing patterns are not alike. Of course, there are the usual suspects. Take a motorsports property that boasts over 300 million television viewers worldwide for EACH race. Are they all quality prospective consumers of your products? Nope. So what should you think about when considering cumulative television audiences?
Remote Control: Wouldn't you like to get into the heads of every one of that motorsports property's viewers? Many of them follow their favorite drivers and don't focus or concentrate on the car splashed with the logo of your company. With digital platforms, pay-per-view and new technologies like TiVo, viewers control the viewing experience - not the property, not the broadcaster, and certainly not the sponsor!
Market Quality: Not all television markets are created equally. If your primary markets only include certain countries in the property's television universe, many of those millions of viewers are inconsequential to you. The property is selling you on the numbers, but how can you get excited about numbers that originate in Denmark or Uruguay if you don't do business in those countries? Your logo means nothing in those countries and you certainly aren't going to buy advertising on broadcasts in those locales. And what about markets where you actually have operations. Are the property's viewers of the same quality to you in each country? They probably are not.
Law of Averages: Let's say you're considering a sponsorship of NASCAR in the U.S. or Formula One in Europe. Don't look at the average television audience size. Instead, analyze the numbers for each individual race. You will find that there are marquee races and there are less popular ones. If you spread your advertising equally across the race schedule or position your logo on the car similarly for each race, you will end up wasting your money.
What Competition? If the sponsorship covers a long season of games, matches or races, you are putting yourself at the mercy of competitive balance - or imbalance. If the winner is determined with half or a third of the schedule remaining, that cumulative audience is going to shrink. Even worse, the remaining viewers are not going to be glued to their sets like they were earlier in the season when every second of the action had meaning.
The bottom line is that the days of measuring sponsorship impact by logo exposure and scale of television audience are long gone. There's only strength in numbers when those numbers represent a high quality audience.
