Fall Sports a Windfall for Advertisers

With the World Series running late, November has been a busy time for advertisers, licensers, and marketers as well as sports fans

By Rick Horrow and Karla Swatek

1. As November Begins, World Series Is the Centerpiece of Bountiful Sports Table

In case you were too busy recovering from Halloween to notice, or too entranced by the full harvest moon, Sunday, Nov. 1 represented a complete harmonic convergence in the world of sport.

According to SportsIllustrated.com, for the first time ever, regular-season and/or postseason NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB games all occurred on the same day. Throw in a NASCAR Chase event at Talladega, the Williams sisters meeting in the World Tennis Assn. season-ender final, the New York Marathon, even a college football game (Marshall @ Central Florida) and you have a state of unprecedented remote control bliss. (Not to mention Brett Favre's triumphant return to Green Bay, the bittersweet icing on this cupcake of a sports day.)

At the center of it all was Game Four of the 2009 World Series, the highest-rated Fall Classic in a decade. While a number of factors are boosting the ratings for this Series, including slightly earlier start times that allow more East Coast kids to take in the games, the match-up between the big-fan-base Yankees and defending champion Phillies is the real draw.

What's good for Fox Sports is good for its advertisers. Ad time for the Series' first five games was all but sold out as soon as the teams were finalized, with ad sales to the likes of DirecTV (DTV), Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD), and General Motors running about 5% ahead of where they were last year according to industry sources. (Advertisers are thought to be paying $400,000 for a single 30-second spot.) Other sponsors activating around the World Series include Taco Bell, which offered free Black Jack Tacos at participating stores on Halloween night, and Gillette, which introduced a new TV spot for its Fusion razor starring Derek Jeter.

World Series licensing and merchandising is on an upswing as well. While top hat vendor New Era, which makes more than 35 million hats a year, is reporting flatter-than-hoped-for postseason orders, Modell's couldn't be happier. Most of the 140 stores in the regional sporting goods chain are in the New York and Philadelphia metro and commuter areas, a perfect selling storm for CEO Mitchell Modell. "When Don King has two fighters in the same boxing match, he can't lose, and that's the way we feel," Modell was quoted last week. And since the Yankees haven't been to the World Series in nine years, retailers nationwide are seeing a sizable demand from the team's large fan base.

Players are scoring off the field as well as on. The MLB players' postseason compensation pool stood at $58.97 million after World Series Game Four, an all-time high. The pool, generated from 60% of net gate receipts of the first three games of each LDS and the first four games of each LCS and the World Series, is proportionate to the stadium capacities of the participating playoff teams—the bigger the ballpark, the bigger the payout.

The New York City Economic Development Corp., moreover, estimates that every World Series game hosted by the Yankees generates $15.5 million in economic impact for the city. Clearly, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other city officials share the sentiments of MLB Executive Vice-President Tim Brosnan, who told SportsBusiness Daily that a six- or seven-game World Series "would have emotional and commercial benefits for us, our fans, and the people we do business with."

While Major League Baseball will end the season with some burning questions, including the use of instant replay and the seemingly growing gap between baseball's haves and have-nots, it's clear the league is ending its 2009 run on a note as high as a Matsui homer launched into the November evening sky.

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