Cha-ching!
Study says Aggies’ bowl run was worth more than $24 million in media exposure
LAS CRUCES — According to a marketing report from main campus, New Mexico State University football-related stories had an earned media value of $24.4 million from Dec. 1, 2017 through Jan. 2, the majority of which was Arizona Bowl coverage.
NMSU football stories had “six figure placements” in the Washington Post, Business Insider, USA Today (which, along with the Las Cruces Sun-News, is part of the USA TODAY NETWORK), ESPN.com and Los Angeles Times. There also were placements in India, Turkey and the United Kingdom.
National media monitor company Meltwater has been tracking the earned media since the university purchased a subscription this summer. The December value dwarfed the other months. For comparison’s sake, November’s report for the entire university yielded $2.7 million in earned media, of which $1.2 was from athletics-related stories.
“The reason we did this is we are in the busi-
ness of creating news releases and other media and monitoring media on a regular basis,” University spokesman Justin Bannister said. “We thought it was a good tool for us to have to be able to put a number on how often NMSU appears in the media and what the value of that coverage is.”
The ESPN.com coverage came with an estimated audience of 26 million people, Bannister said.
The Meltwater service calculation excluded broadcast, Bannister said. The 30-second New Mexico State commercial that was carried on the CBS Sports broadcast and in Arizona Stadium, as well as any of the ESPN SportsCenter features on New Mexico State ending the nation’s longest bowl drought, were not tracked as part of NMSU’s service with Meltwater.
“In a nutshell, what they (Meltwater) do is they find whatever search parameters we put in, so it was for New Mexico State University football (in December),” Bannister said. “They find those in print and online. They measure the size of those stories and they also estimate the reach of those stories. They estimate what it would cost to buy that equivalent amount of space on those publications.”