Weekly Roundup – Week of October 28th, 2024

"The first year of the expanded 12-team College Football Playoff has further stoked interest among advertisers in college sports, with media companies including Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal and Paramount all seeing brands lock in advertising deals for multiple years.
ESPN, with the largest portfolio of college sports, said that while many deals are rooted in college football, they also include flagship content such as “College GameDay” and programming across ACC Network.
“They’re a wide range of different leagues in sports and different mixes of our platforms,” said Jacqueline Dobies, vice president of revenue and yield management at ESPN, pointing to broadcast versus cable, streaming, direct-to- consumer and social. The executive added that while multiyear commitments are not exclusive to college football, the trend started with the company’s original CFP deal, now in its 11th year."

Our Take: Not only do audiences crave the big college sports - basketball, football - they also increasingly are into sports like women's volleyball and men's soccer. College sports is an advertising goldmine.

"You should. I am here to tell you that whether you’re riding the Shohei bandwagon, exulting in a return to glory in the Bronx, or if your team was eliminated from making the playoffs earlier than any team in over 50 years (sorry White Sox fans), you should listen to playoff baseball on the radio.
...
That’s because baseball is the perfect sport for the radio. While the pitch clock has certainly helped speed the games up, the rhythm and cadence of the game still gives the announcers just the right amount of time to set the scene, give precise, terse color commentary, and build the drama."

Our Take: Baseball on the Radio - an intensely American combination.

"...By the end of the meeting, according to four people familiar with it who spoke on condition of anonymity to relay private conversations, it appeared to Mr. Shipley and Mr. Lewis that Mr. Bezos had reservations about The Post endorsing either candidate in the presidential race. But they also thought he was open to persuasion..."

Our Take: We can guarantee that the Washington Post not endorsing a presidential candidate in the 2024 election will have absolutely no impact on the election, whatsoever. We do not believe that undecided voters in swing states were waiting for an endorsement from the Washington Post to make their decision.

"Fox — trapped in the declining cable business, reeling from massive 2020 defamation lawsuits, and despised by American Democrats — has despite it all emerged as a preeminent broadcaster in the final stretch of the presidential campaign. The network has continued to top cable news ratings, averaging 1,571,000 total-day viewers and 2,641,000 primetime viewers last quarter, which the network boasts surpassed ratings for traditional broadcasters ABC and CBS. The top 13 cable news shows among the key 25-54 age group were all on Fox. And Fox expects this to be great for business: “We do expect a very robust political cycle, and we think a record political cycle, [excluding] the Georgia runoff four years ago,” CEO Lachlan Murdoch said on an earnings call in August, responding to a question about television advertising.
The clearest evidence of that robustness: Fox was the only major television outlet to interview all four people on the presidential ticket this week."

Our Take: Democrats may despise Fox News but it doesn't mean they are not watching it. Our research has shown that Fox News is the most watched cable-network, even among Democrats.

"Researchers at New York University have concluded that social media is not an accurate reflection of society, but more like a funhouse mirror distorted by a small but vocal minority of extreme outliers. It's a finding that has special resonance this election season. John Yang speaks with psychology professor Jay Van Bavel, one of the authors of the paper that reported the research, to learn more."

Our Take: Any in-depth political polling will betray that Americans have vastly more in common than they do not. However, the loudest voices on social media usually drive news coverage in that everyone is chasing engagement and virality in our current attention economy. This can lead to a distorting effect where fringe views promoted by few are perceived as the established beliefs among many.