NFL Blames 'Confluence of Events' for Ratings Declines
08 October 2016 - 3:10AM
Dow Jones News
The National Football League has sent a memo to team owners
seeking to ease concerns about the ratings decline that has hit
football this fall.
Through the first four weeks of the season, NFL viewership has
declined 11%, and among the crucial adults 18-49 demographic that
advertisers covet, ratings are down 12%.
"While our partners, like us, would have liked to see higher
ratings, they remain confident in the NFL and unconcerned about a
long-term issue," the letter from NFL senior executives Brian
Rolapp and Howard Katz said, adding that over the last 15 years,
ratings viewership has grown 27% and that football "continues to be
far and away the most powerful programming on television and the
best place for brands and advertisers."
The league said the large drop in ratings for prime-time games
on ESPN, CBS and NBC is likely because of "unprecedented interest
in the Presidential election." On Sunday afternoons, the audience
for Fox News, CNN and MSNBC has increased as well, and the league
believes that is cutting into those games. The letter also cited
the 2000 election as another time when NFL ratings took a hit due
to coverage of the race between George Bush and Al Gore and the
subsequent legal battle over the results.
As for a potential backlash by some viewers angered at players
not standing for the national anthem to protest of police
brutality, the NFL said it sees no evidence to that being a factor
in declining ratings: "In fact, our own data shows that the
perception of the NFL and its players is actually up in 2016."
The NFL said it was issuing the memo to all the teams in
response to media inquiries about the decline in ratings. Long seen
as invincible against the trends and changing media habits that
have negatively affected other programming, network executives and
advertisers have been scrambling to figure out if this is a
short-term blip because of political news or the start of a
long-term trend.
Not everyone is convinced that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump
are solely to blame. Some industry analysts note that as the NFL
continues to place product on more digital platforms, a negative
hit to the broadcast partners is more likely. Others cite that the
NFL may have hit saturation level with games on all day Sunday, as
well as a Monday and Thursday game.
In addition to the election coverage and some fans angered at
the protests, another factor NFL media chief Brian Rolapp cited i n
a Wall Street Journal interview was the absence of some marquee
players due to injury and retirement, as another possible cause of
the lower ratings.
Interestingly, ratings for college football have been up this
season.
Write to Joe Flint at joe.flint@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 07, 2016 11:55 ET (15:55 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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