I’ve been pondering why the TV ratings for the 2010 NASCAR season race coverage have dropped from numbers last year. My initial reaction was I wasn’t sure what was impacting the Sunday (or Saturday night shows) ratings from the last third of the season, except for the fact that ABC stopped airing NASCAR on their primary basic network and scheduled it on the various ESPN channels. In this article, I’m specifically talking about the ESPN coverage of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races.
First, I think I need to address some basic practices about snagging TV ratings viewers for your show:
- Have a great lead-in show,
- Be consistent in presentation,
- Give great information,
- Be easy to digest,
- Make the viewer feel like they’re part of the process,
- Consider the demographic of the viewers.
I’m going to work backwards through this list.
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TV Demographics
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Viewer demographics is a tough pitch for any event that is up against the biggest TV ratings getter on the planet, Football. Before that, it’s baseball. When NASCAR is telecast on a Saturday night, they seem to have fighting chance with ratings.
Informed Viewers
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Making the viewer feel like they’ve been informed or part of the process is a very tough point for any sports telecast. If they pander to the beginner new fan rather than the seasoned fans, folks will rant and rave pretty hard about the shortcomings of any sport telecast. If the network panders to the seasoned viewer, they’re ignoring a huge percentage of viewers who happen to tune in. One of the tricks to TV ratings is being digestable to everyone and hit a happy medium between them. At no one time will everyone be happy, but if you leave out the newbie viewer, you will lose a return viewer. Seasoned, dedicated life-long fans will always return because it’s their beloved sport and the coverage is their only remote access. Networks know this and it seems they don’t worry about the veteran fan too much.
Covering The Name or the Action
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I’ve also seen grumblings from seasoned viewers about the actual coverage. When something exciting is happening in the middle of the pack, the telecast covers the race leaders or name drivers over some of the better, tighter racing in the pack. This is a good example of pandering to the fringe or newer viewer as they cover the name driver that the entire world knows versus covering good racing for the veteran viewer.
Me, when they go five-wide at Bristol, I’d like to see that!!!
Camera Work
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Another grumbling I’ve seen from fans is the camera angle. Many season fans hate in-car bumper cam views versus the view of the field. Here’s where I digress a bit. When you’re watching the cars dance around in the 200 mph traffic, I know what the drivers are doing to keep the car in-place, frantically counter steering left and right to stay in-place. To the newbie it just looks like the car is a bit wobbly and the skill of the drivers make the whole process look easier. So I always like to see that perspective myself. So too, I suspect, do the new viewers. They’re put in the action.
Camera angles from a camera stand, grandstand spot or the air don’t even come close to showing the talent of the drivers and what they’re dealing with. I’m not sure who the in-car camera work upsets but I have a feeling that the angst is across the board with many of the more seasoned fans.
Consistent Presentation
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Being consistent in presentation is a big category for me and many viewers and it feels like NASCAR is a victim to this category as ESPN has consistently bumped NASCAR pre-race shows and cut off post-race shows. This has disillusioned the veteran viewers across the board as we’ve been treated to every other sport pre-empting NASCAR, including little league baseball. (Seriously, I’m not joking with that one!)
Some post-race shows have been cut off abruptly through the latter half of the season also. But then again, we all remember Phoenix a few years ago when ABC left the race with less than 20 laps to go in favor of America’s Funniest Videos. I think that’s why they’ve put the show on ESPN, to avoid their contractual obligational conflicts.
Lead-In Telecasts
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One of the bigger factors for any network in getting good ratings for their shows is the lead-in show. Show scheudles are constantly juggled to give each show the best combination of factors for the best ratings. At least that’s how it is in prime time. If I were to take my lead from ESPN, that doesn’t seem to matter. That’s becuase their lead-in show is on a different channel than the race coverage. That breaks all the rules I know of with getting good ratings. Could this be part of the issue with lower ratings this season? Eh, I can’t be sure on that factor but it does stand up and catch my attention. Being off of ABC, having your pre-show be on a different numbered channel than the race… it can’t be helping.
We Have Other Venues
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In the end there are a lot of factors that go into snagging good TV ratings but I can’t help but wonder if you look at just these few factors I’ve addressed, if we can’t also add a serious mass exodus to other venues of information becuase of how ESPN has handled their duties to the NASCAR fan.
We do have many other venues we can check out. SIRIUS / XM Subscribers have the NASCAR Channel, online users can follow the NASCAR website and live feed updates. (There’s a reason we don’t see something like TNT’s Racebuddy on NASCAR.com. Check out The DalyPlanet on that bit.)
We also have the heavily updated feeds from Twitter. Twitter has changed the face of sports and many othe news and sporting venues and one can litterally experience an entire event via Twitter. In fact if one doesn’t really need the visuals of the television coverage, we can combine our experience of following the live lap-by-lap and live leaderboards on NASCAR.com, with Twitter and the many feeds reporters deliver and you can have almost the complete experience of the event while it happens.
Time
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NASCAR races are at a minimum, three hours in length and go on even longer when things go wrong like weather or too many on-track accidents. Viewers, no matter how much they like something, have an attention span duration that defies lengthy broadcasts and I can’t help but wonder about this. Most movies are two hours long. Most shows, an hour. Some of the better rated shows are also thirty minutes long. Football has bursts of energetic action broken up with the tactics of time-outs and such.
When the shorter, NASCAR Nationwide events are on, the telecasts are better suited to those whose lives are pretty busy. They’re digestible because there’s very little running around and killing time. I seriously think that shorter telecasts will help the sport in the long run.
Me, I love the sport and I love having the excuse to kick it on the couch for a long period of time… a valid excuse to hang out on the couch. But I think I would pay more attention to an event if there was less of a lag between start and finish. The middle game can be tiring to follow unless something huge, game-changing happens to a name driver.
Yet there is an issue with shortening races… it’s up to the track owners and other legal obligations that constrain the length. Maybe the networks put their foot down and say something that will help this overall deal. Maybe NASCAR should step in and say, Hey!, help us out here! Someone has to.
One & Done
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Today in the modern era, some sports have to look at how they deliver their events. With the busy life of the fans, they need to understand just how much a fan will tolerate before they tune out mentally. Football has excitement every down. NASCAR’s excitement comes from the double-file green flag starts and I must confess, the accidents are also ratings getters. If they weren’t, the sports networks wouldn’t replay them over and over.
That’s the sad part of this whole deal… we’re subject to the Nielsen families and what they like. And they like excitment, action and drama. Real-time drama. Running endless, quiet laps filling time is not that.
Suggestions
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Shorter telecasts. Better lead-in programming that is on the same channel as the main event. Shorter telecasts will also help reign in over-runs and pre-empting the following networks. The different business entities need to quip quibbling and get it all together. It’s like drafting… while they’re disjointed, they’re losing ground. We need to see Turner and NASCAR and everyone else get it together and think of the fan. Oh, and they don’t have cheerleaders!
That’s my quick, short list of ideas to help raise the TV ratings for NASCAR. Does anyone have any other thoughts?
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