A few years ago, Highbury Stadium in north London, home of the Arsenal soccer team, had to be torn up behind each goal so that the standing-room-only terraces could be replaced with seats. To hide the construction work, Arsenal put up a plywood wall–painted with a mural that on television looked like a crowd of living, cheering fans.
Maybe ESPN should consider something similar for its baseball games. The sports-cable network broadcasts games every Wednesday and Sunday night, and ever since April 25, when the strike-delayed major league season began, there have been plenty of empty seats on view–not the best promotion for the sport.
But while fans still angry after the consumer-relations disaster of the 234-day strike are staying away from the ball park, many are still permitting themselves to peek at baseball on television.
Baseball’s attendance is down more than 20 percent over the comparable period last year. Yet ESPN’s ratings have dipped only slightly, according to A.C. Nielsen. And advertisers seem to be crossing their fingers and plunging ahead regardless of the big drop in stadium attendance. They are optimistically buying commercials on ESPN, as well as ABC and NBC, at a healthy rate and at prices slightly ahead of last year’s. Those two networks will carry baseball after the mid-July All-Star break.
“Everyone’s been surprised, both advertisers and the baseball community, that attendance is down as badly as it is,” said Tony Ponturo, vice president of corporate media and sports marketing at the Anheuser-Busch Cos., a big baseball advertiser. He thinks, though, that ratings will recover.
Baseball did not start this year until April 25, by which time the National Hockey League and National Baketball Association playoffs were under way. Those playoffs, now in their final rounds, always mean competition for televised baseball, but this year baseball had three weeks’ less time to take root with its fans.
“A lot of people feel the period from the end of the NHL and NBA playoffs until the end of July will be a really telling time,” Ponturo said. “That’s when baseball has full exposure, with no distractions in the local markets or in national television exposure. That’s when we’ll see if people really start to come back.”
Advertisers are betting they will. A 30-second spot on ABC or NBC baseball games later in the season is selling for $330,000–about $20,000 more than last year’s rate. And advertising for the All-Star game, on ABC on July 11, is nearly sold out.
After the All-Star game, the weekly broadcasts will begin, first on ABC for six weeks, then on NBC for six weeks. According to the Baseball Network, a partnership of Major League Baseball, ABC Sports and NBC Sports formed in 1993 to share advertising revenue, much of the advertising for those games was sold last year, in two-year packages, to companies like Anheuser-Busch, MCI Communications, Texaco Inc. and Toyota.
The partnership–which replaced the old system under which networks paid a fee for rights to baseball, and then sold the advertising themselves–expected revenue of $170 million to $200 million each year, but it had to refund nearly $100 million to advertisers last year, its first of operations, because of the strike-shortened season.
At ESPN, George Bodenheimer, the senior vice president of sales and marketing, said ad sales had been strong despite competition from basketball playoffs and the slightly lower ratings.
This year, ESPN scored a 1.6 average rating for games from the April 25 start of the season through June 7. That number was the same for the corresponding period last year and down from a 1.8 average last year from the normal starting date of April 5 through June 8. Each rating point represents 954,000 households.
Baseball is fortunate, several buyers said, that the advertising market this year has been strong across the board. Many advertisers are eager to buy anything on network television in prime time with an audience likely to include young adult males, even if it means a risk that the ratings will be lower than last year’s.
“If they want to buy time on national broadcasts, in prime time, there is very little available and it’s very expensive,” said Jerry Dominus, director of national television and programming at J. Walter Thompson U.S.A. “So by default baseball is one way to go.”
So the networks need not wring their hands just yet. And the fact that pennant races, the league championship series and the World Series all got wiped out last year may make fans eager to watch those showcase events when they finally come around again this year.
If, that is, they come around again. Nobody knows the degree to which fans are aware of and affected by baseball’s current labor situation, which is essentially the same as last year: no contract, no solution imminent.
“The biggest worry is there’s no closure to the issue that put everyone in this position in the first place,” Ponturo said. “As a fan or a consumer, you don’t want to jump in and get excited all over again, if you don’t really know what’s around the corner.”
