Super Bowl numbers well below ‘simsub’ days
For the second year running, big- budget U. S. commercials apparently lured millions of Canadians away from local Super Bowl broadcasts.
BCE Inc.- owned Bell Media attracted an average audience of 4.45 million viewers for the National Football League’s championship game on CTV, CTV Two and TSN2 on Sunday night, s pokesman Scott Henderson said in an email Monday.
While the number was stable as compared to the 4.47 million viewers in 2017, i t was down 40 per cent from 7.32 million viewers in 2016 — the last broadcast before the federal regulator changed the rules to allow U. S. ads to air in Canada.
In 2017, t he Canadian Radio- television and Telecommunications Commission banned simultaneous substitution — the practice of replacing U. S. ads with Canadian ones — during the Super Bowl.
T he CRTC ’ s goal was to please consumers who wanted to see the flashy U. S. ads. Under the new policy, viewers still see Canadian ads if they choose to watch on a local station, but they can watch American commercials if they flip to NBC.
Bell and the NFL have been fighting the decision in court ever since, arguing the CRTC didn’t have the jurisdiction to ban “simsub” for a single broadcast. The federal court rejected their arguments, so in January they applied for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Bell continues to blame the CRTC decision for the loss of nearly 3 million viewers during the most-watched live TV event of the year.
“The decision has had a significant negative im- pact on national and local Canadian advertising for the game, and reduced investment by advertisers adversely affects the broader Canadian broadcasting and creative community,” Henderson said in an email.
In 2017, Bell said the ad policy cost it $ 11 million. It also blamed it, in part, for dozens of layoffs at local TV and radio stations around the country.
Despite efforts to entice Canadians to watch Bell stations with perks including $ 300,000 in contest prizes, the viewership volume did not rebound this year.
“It can be difficult to compete when U. S. brands are allowed to advertise to Canadians for free,” Henderson said. “We continue to pursue every opportunity to manage these impacts and resolve an unfair decision.”
That said, the Canadian broadcasts appeared to beat their American counterparts in some cities, according to ratings supplied by Bell.
In Toronto, Henderson said Bell’s stations delivered a 17.3 rating for audience ages 25 to 54 compared to a 7.8 rating for Buffalo’s NBC station. In Montreal, CTV and TSN2 had a 17.8 rating compared to 11.7 for NBC.
The Supreme Court is expediting Bell’s application for leave to appeal.
In the United States, overall viewership declined for the third straight year.
Sunday night’s game attracted 103.4 million viewers on NBC, according to the network, down 7.1 per cent from last year. Including online viewing, the audience was 106 million, a drop of 6.8 per cent from 2017 and still not as big as the turnout for the 2010 Super Bowl.
The record f or a U. S. Super Bowl audience was in 2015, when 114.4 million TV viewers tuned in.