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Nets Remain in Chase for Ratings

Oct 28, 2007  •  Post A Comment

As the NASCAR season speeds toward its conclusion, ratings may be down on ABC, but trackside reporter Mike Massaro is certainly in a better place.
Mr. Massaro remembers working for ESPN when the sports network didn’t have a deal with NASCAR. ESPN kept its racing show “RPM Tonight” on the air despite not being allowed to shoot interviews inside race tracks. That meant he had to conduct interviews in places like parking lots.
Now he’s on the inside with ESPN and ABC, which this year was hoping to build interest in the Chase for the Nextel Cup, a playoff-style series of races that will crown the year’s top driver. For the first time, this year’s final 10 races are on ABC as part of a $270 million-a-year deal signed in 2005.
Through the first five races in the Chase, ratings were down 4 percent from last year, when the races were on NBC and TNT. The Nextel Cup race at Martinsville, Va., on Oct. 21 drew a 3.78 household rating, down 8 percent from NBC’s race last year.
That reinforces thinking by some that NASCAR, which showed phenomenal growth in the early part of the decade, has peaked. ESPN execs and some other experts disagree.
“I think there’s still tremendous growth prospects for NASCAR,” said consultant John Mansell, pointing to a very loyal audience that’s known to drive hundreds of miles to see a race, and the fact that the circuit has been upgrading to more major markets.
Mr. Mansell said the lower ratings are symptomatic of a more competitive landscape for sports on television.
“Take any weekend now. I think the number of college football games has doubled from what it was even as recently as five years ago,”
he said. “The competition and the audience fragmentation just means everything’s going down, unless you’re NFL football.”
But from another perspective, NASCAR and its TV partners are still looking at a checkered victory flag.
“The real issue is what’s happening with advertising, and the cost per thousand [viewers] continues to rise for sports programming, even as ratings decline,” Mr. Mansell said.
The decline in household ratings for NASCAR is being driven by losses in people 55 years and older, according to Artie Bulgrin, senior VP of research and sales development at ESPN. “We’re still trying to figure that out.”
More important, ratings are up among men, especially in the 18 to 34 age bracket, which showed 5 percent growth so far during the Chase and bigger gains for races on ESPN earlier this season.
“Demographically, which is where we make our money with advertisers, the Cup is holding up pretty well, so we’re pretty pleased with the results,” Mr. Bulgrin said.
The string of NASCAR races also has boosted ABC’s ratings on Sunday afternoon by 400 percent.
“That’s the reason we thought it was time to get back into NASCAR, because it’s a major event on a week-to-week basis, bringing in large audiences that are very, very loyal, and it has done the trick for us on both ESPN and ABC,” Mr. Bulgrin said.
ESPN certainly doesn’t think the sport has peaked. And adding high-definition broadcasts of the races should help, Mr. Bulgrin said.
On air, Mr. Massaro said the Chase should have the kind of exciting conclusion it was designed to create for NASCAR.
“The intensity ratchets up quite a bit,” he said. “Jimmie Johnson described the Chase as ‘10 weeks of hell’ because these guys are under so much pressure. They don’t want to mess up. They want to be as perfect as they possibly can. And it’s almost impossible to do.”
This year’s Chase also has an interesting personal dynamic because the leaders are Jeff Gordon and Mr. Johnson, who had been Mr. Gordon’s protégé and won the championship last year.
“To see them actually battling for the championship is an interesting irony,” Mr. Massaro said.
From where he’s sitting, Mr. Massaro does not think NASCAR has peaked. He thinks the influx of foreign drivers will increase interest. And his friends back home in Connecticut, not a NASCAR hotbed, are watching.
The Chase means Mr. Massaro will spend 18 straight weekends away from his family, including his sons, Nicholas, 6, and Anthony, 4. They’re too young to go to the track, he said, “but believe me, they like watching racing on TV.”
Mr. Massaro said a few weeks ago he and fellow ESPN announcer Allen Bestwick were in Bristol, Tenn., for a presentation and they had lunch at Mr. Massaro’s house with his son.
“Anthony recognized Allen from television and was a little bit star-struck, which surprised me. But after Allen left, he told my wife, Kristin, ‘Next time can Daddy bring Jimmie Johnson home?’ So I’ve got to work on that, I guess.”

15 Comments

  1. “The decline in household ratings for NASCAR is being driven by losses in people 55 years and older, according to Artie Bulgrin, senior VP of research and sales development at ESPN. “We’re still trying to figure that out.”
    Amazin how clueless this guy is. I just brush that demo, and I can’t tell you how many times I have missed a race…because instead of it being on Sunday afternoon, as it has been forever, these lunkheads moved them to Saturday night. Get the races back on their traditional schedule, watch the viewers come back.
    Not helping is ABC’s image of open-wheel racing coverage with drivers with names like Ian, Juan, etc (non-Americans)…what NASCAR fan would have thought to look there?

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