(Allen Kee/ESPN Images)
For a long time, the world has figuratively stopped and paid its collective attention to a few, certain, transcendent sports properties in prime time: the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the NBA Finals and a few others.
More and more, however, sports tops the charts on a routine basis, drawing more eyeballs than that night’s competition – entertainment, news, reality and other offerings up and down the dial.
Hindsight being 20/20, if in 1979 you had been told to grab onto one genre of TV and hang on – and if you were smart, like, say, ESPN founder Bill Rasmussen – it would’ve been sports.
Fast forward to 2016.
As of July 31, 22 of the year’s top 25 live-viewed telecasts on TV were sports. Expand the list to the top 50 and it’s 40.
There’s ever-more channels and more options. But through all the changes, if you want to reach viewers who are drawn to live, compelling content that can’t be rented or taped, sports wins. And that matters to advertisers.
“Our key message at our Upfront presentation in May was ‘The Power of Live’, because in a world of ad avoidance, ‘view-ability’ concerns and commercial clutter, no environment aggregates the kind of audience, consistently, that live sports does,” said President, ESPN Global Sales and Marketing Ed Erhardt. “Advertisers turn to ESPN because they know their message will break through and be heard.”
In addition, the sports share of the top live-viewed telecasts will no doubt rise in the final months of the year, thanks to the Olympics in Rio, the NFL, college football and the NBA.
That’s no surprise to Erhardt. “Live sports increasingly makes up a large chunk of live television viewing and ESPN represents a big part of that,” he said.
