Super Bowl ratings

[Steve Timko]

So Super Bowl ratings will spike this year since Taylor Swift will likely be there. She is scheduled to play Feb. 10 at the Tokyo Dome. That gives her enough time to take her private jet to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl.

My question is, will this spike have a lasting effect? Will more people watch the Super Bowl in following years, even if Taylor is not there? I think it will.

[Kevin M.]

As we are at the twilight of broadcast television, it is difficult to predict how the SuperBowl will fare when viewers must stream it. Sports has maintained ratings compared to other produced series, but sponsors are starting to realize that doesn’t automatically lead to audiences buying advertised products (in fact, rarely does it lead to that). 

Kevin M. (RPCV)

On Sun, Jan 28, 2024 at 3:37 PM Steve Timko <steve...@gmail.com> wrote:

So Super Bowl ratings will spike this year since Taylor Swift will likely be there. She is scheduled to play Feb. 10 at the Tokyo Dome. That gives her enough time to take her private jet to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl.

My question is, will this spike have a lasting effect? Will more people watch the Super Bowl in following years, even if Taylor is not there? I think it will.

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[PGage]

I think we are still some years off from the Super Bowl being exclusively on Peacock or some other streamer (this year you will have the option of watching on P+).  And while it is difficult to make predictions about absolute broadcast ratings these days, it is a lock that for as long as linear television is a thing, the NFL will increasingly be what keeps it alive, Swift or no Swift.

But I guess Steve’s question really is whether Swift fans who did not previously follow the NFL will start after sampling the Super Bowl due to her influence. To a large extent that has been the rationale behind the pop music halftime concerts of course. The NFL has been obscenely successful, so maybe that does work to some extent, and maybe we will see some SwiftEffect on the margins. I suspect any significant Swift Effect though would result from a long term relationship between her and Kelce, with her continuing to post pics on her social media of her watching and enjoying football.

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[JW]

> My question is, will this spike have a lasting effect? Will more people
> watch the Super Bowl in following years, even if Taylor is not there? I

> think it will.

How much have ratings for Chiefs games gone up this year? (I'm asking because I don't know the answer.)

My guess is that most of the people who want to see Taylor and her boyfriend have been watching for a while. Some will find they like the game and continue to watch; others won't.

And the Super Bowl audience gets to Kevin's point about streaming. The NFL is one of the last big ratings generators for broadcast television, and if it becomes pay-per-view, a lot of casual fans will decide that they'd rather pay for something else. The Super Bowl is particularly strong, and that's the one show where viewers, including those who couldn't care less about football, will actually make a point of watching the commercials. So it's going to be a while before the Super Bowl isn't available free.

[Adam Bowie]

I saw in Matt Belloni's latest email that last week's divisional game got a record 50.4m viewers. So I assume that yesterday's will top that. Belloni predicts record breaking Super Bowl ratings - although I wonder if that is Swift fans, and not just the fact that, in the US, NFL is the monoculture now? Wouldn't most Swift fans have been watching the Super Bowl anyway? 

Broadcast isn't going away any time soon, with the existing contracts running through to 2033 or something. I'd suggest that the ability of the NFL to maintain audiences will be more down to its cultural importance going forward.

[Side note: The UK, and many other European countries, have lists of sporting events that have to be carried on free-to-air TV. That ensures that games like the World Cup Final, Wimbledon tennis, the FA Cup Final and others are not exclusively on pay-TV. It helps maintain their cultural value even if the sports bodies that own those events can't necessarily maximise those rights' values. The big outlier here is the Premier League, which is not protected in this way for live games. So they're exclusively on pay-TV networks - Sky, TNT Sport, Amazon - with only highlights protected, currently Match of the Day on the BBC. Yet, the Premier League remains the popular sports competition in the country, just with nowhere near the pro-rata live audiences that the NFL gets.]

Adam

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[Doug Eastick]

In my house, the following has happened since the Tayvis partnering:

1) wife learned the rules of football.

2) watched a number of KC games with me.

3) Asked at the beginning of the DET-SF game "are there any players in this game that are going out with a megastar?   If no, I'm going to watch Netflix".

:)

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[PGage]

Last January 81% of US men identified as avid or casual NFL fans, vs 59% of US women. I don’t know the corresponding breakdown for Taylor Swift fans, but assuming it is at least as skewed the other way towards women, there is some potential for Swift bringing in new fans to NFL games. But again, this at best would be a marginal impact I would think.

Plus, as noted, the NFL already has a bunch of non fans sampling the Super Bowl every year, for the half time show and the commercials*. Swift may have some measurable improvement on that, but I doubt it’s a game changer.

*The NFL’s success at convincing such a large fraction of the population that Super Bowl commercials are so much more entertaining than regular commercials that they justify watching the game for non fans still ranks in my book as the number one marketing achievement if the modern age. 

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1098882/interest-level-football-gender/

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[JW]

> *The NFL’s success at convincing such a large fraction of the population
> that Super Bowl commercials are so much more entertaining than regular
> commercials that they justify watching the game for non fans still ranks in

> my book as the number one marketing achievement if the modern age.

I think the advertising industry gets credit for that, not the NFL. As someone once said about the Super Bowl, "It's like we have a deal with the advertisers. They'll try to make entertaining commercials, and we'll watch." (And, yes, some of those commercials succeed more than others.) As long as they're spending $7 million for 30 seconds, they can afford to throw a few extra bucks at the production, and even the promotion: I'm already starting to see commercials previewing Super Bowl commercials.

[PGage]

Perhaps,  but it it’s not because the SB commercials are on the whole actually entertaining, it’s because they have marketed the SB commercials as entertaining.

I learned over Thanksgiving during a long, intense and joyful conversation with three of my early 20s nieces that I have heard of 3 Taylor Swift songs (this after I had proclaimed at the table that I could not recognize a single Swift song, leading to getting charmingly serenaded to like 25 songs that all sounded roughly the same, but to which the words of three I recognized). I would so much rather be exposed to 3 or 4 brief cutaways to Taylor Swift during the Super Bowl than even one SB commercial.

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