NFL gives television playbook an update
If you notice more split-screens and fewer commercial breaks on NFL broadcasts this coming season, credit the fans who served as football’s lab rats.
Last fall, just as TV ratings went into a tailspin, the NFL invited fans into a lab designed like a living room. Technicians asked them to watch games, tracking their eyes, heart rates and skin response. They saw different ad formats, including split-screens with commercials on one side and the field on the other.
The tests — the most extensive ever by the league — are contributing to big changes in how games will be broadcast when the regular season starts Sept. 7 with a Thursday night matchup on NBC between the Kansas City Chiefs and New England Patriots. The goal is to keep viewers engaged and protect the US$3.5 billion in annual TV advertising taken in by NBC, CBS, Fox, ESPN and the NFL Network.
“It’s really about the pace of the game and eliminating downtime,” says Amanda Herald, the NFL’s director of media strategy and business development. “I do think there will be a positive impact.”
NFL TV viewership fell about eight per cent last year, according to Nielsen data, hurt by weak matchups and competition from the U.S. presidential campaign, along with negative publicity surrounding concussions and player protests during the U.S. national anthem. The average TV audience for a regular-season game shrank to 16.5 million in the U.S.
Measuring fans’ physical responses to commercials — a process known as biometrics — has been around for years and has its skeptics. The idea is to understand not just what viewers say in focus groups, but how TV shows or ads make them feel.
“We’re really starting to study how people are watching games,” Tod Leiweke, the NFL’s chief operating officer, said recently at an event hosted by GeekWire. “We’re going into people’s homes and replicating the game experience and trying to watch everything from what their eyes are following to what their behaviour is during commercials breaks.”
One big change is a cut in the number of commercial breaks to four per quarter from five. They’ll be longer, so the networks can sell the same number of commercials, but less frequent. There will be 30 per cent fewer promotional messages, such as when CBS urges viewers to stick around after the game for 60 Minutes.
“When you have touchdown, commercial, kickoff, commercial, it becomes unwatchable,” said Andrew Donchin, chief investment officer at Dentsu Aegis Network in the U.S., whose clients include General Motors.
The networks also will experiment with different types of commercials, according to Herald. Some will be shown in split-screen, with an ad on one side and what’s happening in the stadium on the other.
The NFL will also tweak how games are run to speed them up. Instead of reviewing plays on a sideline monitor, referees will use a hand-held tablet while consulting with officials in New York, in part to make decisions faster. Overtime will be cut to 10 minutes from 15.
In a nod to younger audiences, the league also granted broadcasters and tech companies more rights to distribute games over the internet. Amazon.com will stream Thursday night NFL games for the first time this season, after Twitter streamed them last year.