Stay with me, this is the ONE TIME that talking about nielsen numbers is actually interesting to somebody who doesn’t work in television.
The ratings for Super Bowl XLIX might become actual legitimate news.
As I’ve said numerous times before, TV ratings are the fantasy football leagues of the media world. To you, your numbers are THE MOST important thing in the entire world. To the rest of the outside world….It’s like Jay Cutler, it’s DOOOOON’T CAAAAAREEE.
Anyway, this is a very interesting exchange between a media reporter and NBC Sports Group Chairman Mark Lazarus. This was yesterday on a Super Bowl XLIX conference call:
Mark, given the popularity of the NFL and the Super Bowl, why haven’t we seen that 50 rating yet, do you think with everything going on between the top two teams in the League and DeflateGate that we might see a 50 rating?
MARK LAZARUS: Boy, I hope so. It would be nice. I just think in this era of media fragmentation, people are doing a variety of things.
I actually really believe, if you think that Nielsen reports, and essentially 115, 120 million people watch the Super Bowl. There’s a little over 300 million people in the country. That does not account for bars, parties, other things. I believe that the number is under reported somewhat substantially. And there are a lot more people watching the Super Bowl in group gatherings, whether it’s at universities, clubs, other places. Would that get us all the way to a 50? It might. But we’re not going to get credit for that.
But I hope your prognostication here is correct, and we’ll all be celebrating the first 50 in Super Bowl history. I don’t know what the methodology is, but it just dawned on me, there are a lot of Super Bowl parties around the country and say 200 people are there, I don’t know how that gets factored into a rating, but let’s say they don’t have that party, and they have 50 families watching separately on 50 television sets, maybe that would take you to about a 60 rating.
If you take 120 million or so and add all the parties, there’s no doubt in my mind that one in every two Americans is watching the game. That’s pretty phenomenal power.
Do you have a goal in mind viewer wise, what you want to have for this game?
MARK LAZARUS: To be the biggest thing ever viewed, over 125 million would be a nice number.
Lazarus makes a lot of good points there. It’s true that Super Bowl XLIX will actually get millions more viewers than what they actually get credit for, due to parties, bars, gatherings etc. He’s right.
However, the idea that literally half of America will tune in….that’s total rubbish.
Don’t buy that idea for a second. Lots of people do not care about Super Bowl XLIX. Many people who work within the industry get completely sick of it by Tuesday due to the excessive over-coverage.
One in three Americans is a lot more accurate than one in two. One in three is also a “phenomenal amount of power” as Lazarus put it.
Watch this video from Keith Olbermann below, it shows graphs and charts that convey how most people, 72% of Americans actually, DON’T CARE:
It will be interesting to see if NBC reaches their 125,000,000 goal. Even 120m would be a new record. 115m would be really impressive enough in itself. Therefore, we have another number to pay attention to in Super Bowl XLIX.
Not just the score, but the ratings.
Paul M. Banks owns, operates and writes The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with Fox Sports Digital, eBay, Google News and CBS Interactive Inc.
You can read Banks’ feature stories in the Chicago Tribune RedEye newspaper and listen to him on KOZN 1620 The Zone. Follow him on Twitter (@paulmbanks)