Sinclair – Attracting Passionate Viewers Nationally

Perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of buying television nowadays is reaching an incredibly passionate audience efficiently. But Sinclair has a compelling proposition. In their footprint of 185 stations in 86 markets, plus some market partnerships, they collect an audience base of passionate, engaged fans that roll up into a national footprint. Sinclair’s Jon Spaet, Senior Vice President Network Sales and Rich Donnelly, Director of Sales, shared their long term strategy and the results.

“Sinclair always has been and is a an entrepreneurial creative results driven company,” Spaet began, “and one of the things that that chief operating officer and said to me, years ago, was we've got this huge footprint, (I actually went back and looked at the time - 177 stations in 79 markets), and we want to create a network. So I tell this little anecdote because we built this from the ground up.”

The components for such an effort include not only the need to collect the data but to also sell it to advertisers. As Donnelly explained, “Broadcast TV, even considering the erosion that's been going on for a while, is still the best way to reach a mass audience and for many advertisers it's still a big piece of their media plan.” But, he admitted, “The erosion does pose a problem. How do advertisers deal with eroding audiences while, at the same time, networks demand increases in pricing because the supply is going away? What we do is create rating points. We take local inventory and put it together making it into a national footprint and bring rating points to the marketplace.”

The Sinclair proposition is based on their ability to garner rating points on their broadcast affiliates with, “programming that everybody is familiar with and in a family friendly environment,” Donnelly noted, “and we bring it with efficiencies. It solves one problem that all the buyers have each year.” Sinclair coins this a, “boutique approach. We don't want to be everything to everybody. We're not going to be a big box store. We want to be the boutique on the corner that when you come in, they know your face, they know what you want, they know what you're looking to buy, they'll know exactly your sizes and things of that nature,” Donnelly added. This is all done among a limited group of advertisers because the inventory is limited and guaranteed. But, he stated, “We bring it to them with a level of stewardship and service that is unparalleled these days.”

“We have inventory that is essentially a diversified portfolio of broadcast assets that includes digital extensions to our linear platforms. We have an in-house agency called Compulsive that is standalone even though it was built from within Sinclair,” noted Spaet. And Sinclair is advancing into all types of digital access including the introduction of flow code which, according to Spaet, is like, “QR codes on steroids. It's a best in class custom designed data and science dynamic to redirect destination,” to “help quantify our viewership besides Nielsen ratings and into the posts.”

Between affiliate programming, local news and sports, there is ample opportunity for advertisers to reach any target consumer group they want, with a large proportion of viewers from a very desirable demographic with discretionary income. Donnelly noted that, “While being a broadcast entity, everybody tends to be a little bit on the older side. We're a strong adult 25 to 54 and 35+.” Spaet added that this group, has “the greatest concentration of wealth. That's where advertising should be focused on. 18 to 49 is a is a legacy leftover from the 1980s It's silly.” The most popular advertiser categories include Insurance, Travel, Health, Pharm, Fast Food and CPG.

Sinclair has expanded its regional sports offerings with Bally. Spaet explained that, “We were one of the few bidders when Disney, under government review, had to divest the regional sports networks - 45 teams – and we were one of the few bidders and were acquire it.”

And, when it comes to passionate viewers, look no further than local news. According to Spaet, “We're selling the local anchors in Austin, in Bakersfield and Green Bay and Washington and Cincinnati and West Palm. Local news anchors, as it has been proven time and time again, are the most trusted anchors in every market. People bond with them. We are aggregating those local news ratings and selling it as a network.”

Donnelly added that, “The way people use the local news is much different than what they look for from national services. It's about weather, traffic, how the local sports teams are doing, what's going on in the local mayor's races. The pandemic really heightened that with news of the spiking in parts of the country. It became more and more important and I think that that will continue.”

Local news is also a reach extender. According to Spaet, “We have research that shows that 60% of our local news audiences don't watch any of the cable network news networks because they're using it for a whole different reason. It's a much more trusted news environment.”

For Donnelly, the strategy for the upfront and beyond is to, “Lean into our message of delivering the broadcast impressions that people are always looking to buy. I don't see broadcast rating erosion slowing down anytime soon and I don't believe that the broadcast networks are going to stop charging more next year than they did the year before. So our positioning of having a full national footprint of broadcast impressions in a family friendly environment and with efficiencies will be important. It was important last year. It's going to become more important next year and I think in the foreseeable future. That's what we have found successful and that's why we have a really high 90 95% renewal rate every year. We expect that to continue.”

Spaet agreed and concluded, “For every upfront we've done, we've sold out a fixed percentage of inventory on our stations. We tend to sell out during the open period which has worked for us. But more importantly, it's worked for our partner clients as well.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

Everything You Wanted to Know About Esports. An Interview with Zach Oscar

Zach Oscar, Esports and Gaming Consultant, his esports teeth in 2018 writing for MediaPost on the Gaming/Esports industries and, at the same time, working for MRI-Simmons on their esports/gaming data offering. That combination enabled him to explore both the news and the measurement side of that business. 

He has also presented, “Video Gaming and Esports; A Clarification,” to companies such as AMC Networks, Comscore, and Sinclair Broadcasting to help them keep up to date on this fast-moving and confusing landscape. Most recently he has been working with Simulmedia as they enter the in-game advertising space. He has presented an industry overview of advertising in esports and gaming at a recent Secret Society meeting which is a gathering of advanced TV executives. 

Charlene Weisler: How do you define esports?

Zach Oscar: Esports refers specifically to professional, organized, regulated, sponsored multiplayer video game competition. So why is there so much confusion? Games like Fortnite make people think that anyone who plays Fortnite plays esports. Unless you’re playing for a prize, in a regulated professional environment against other professionals, you’re not in esports, you’re a gamer. 

Weisler: We talk about esports and gaming as the same thing, but there are obviously differences. Can you go into the differences and similarities?

Oscar: Both esports and gaming are about video games. Esports exists within the broader gaming ecosystem. However, while all esports are video games, not all video games are esports. For example, some of the world's most popular game lines like Skyrim, Animal Crossing, and God of War are not esports capable, meaning they don't have a competitive angle through which multiplayer professional teams could compete for prizes and the championship titles.

Weisler: How does esports compare with traditional sports? 

Oscar: In some respects they are similar. Esports senior management have deliberately talked about how they parallel to the traditional sports world i.e. a developmental/high school equivalent, a minor league system, a major league system, and then a championship. 

But there are differences. Esports are growing faster in the 18-34 year old category than almost any other sport except the NFL and NBA. The viewing experience between the two are very different. If you're watching a football game, talking with friends or others about it requires you to either have friends in person, on the phone, or message through a third party app not tied directly to the sports broadcast. Places to watch esports like Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook Gaming all have chat capabilities integrated into the platform, and community engagement during these games is massive. People comment on gameplay, send funny memes, put in specific codes during the broadcast to try to enter to win prizes, it's a very unique experience. 

However, the most crucial difference is ownership. In basketball, for example, no one owns the sport. The NBA is the league operation which regulates the game. Very rarely are any changes made. In esports, the publishers and developers who create these games are often the owners of the leagues in which they are played, too. The games change ALL the time. New characters, weapons, abilities, etc. can have a fundamental impact on the gameplay. So not only do they regulate the play, but they also set the terms of the play itself.

Advertisers can work with publishers to find ways to get into the games themselves in an authentic and player-focused way. League of Legends, for example, has recently announced a few partners for its in-game banner advertising which will only be visible to people watching the esports competition online, not to the actual athletes playing the game. Mastercard is one of the first to get on this wave. 

Weisler: How have esports evolved over the past 3 years?

Oscar: People say that esports are still not mainstream but esports' presence has been creeping up for many years. Since 2016, competitions like the ESL Pro Counter Strike championship have been filling up massive arenas like the Barclays, and acquiring major, almost unthinkable partnerships/sponsorships from big name brands over the past year alone. For example, Louis Vuitton, BMW, Gucci, and other unexpected advertisers have entered the esports scene. 

Also, games like Fortnite and Call of Duty Warzone (Call of Duty's Fortnite equivalent) have become so popular as video games, that by extension of their interest in the game itself people are watching competitive esports. So many more people are gamers today and some of those people then get into esports. 

Another trend is the experimental expansion of esports. Activision Blizzard, creators of Overwatch and Call of Duty, have begun attempting to create local team franchises based in the US and abroad to foster a traditional sports like following. Because of this, too, there is more planned esports specific venue building and therefore opportunity for regional sports networks to air competitions. Plus, esports have acted as a substitute for traditional sports in lieu of COVID-19; some professional athletes have held their competitions virtually, for fun, like NASCAR's iRacing virtual competition that took place earlier this year in lieu of normal races. 

Weisler: Has the pandemic caused any change in the esports model?

Oscar: With the pandemic halting in-person competition until recently, there was a lot of hype around the ease with which esports would be able to continue onwards totally online. There's definitely merit to that idea - the Call of Duty League championships, which took place just this past Sunday broke their peak viewership on YouTube for any of their other esports competitions at 331,000 viewers on the platform - the previous peak was around 200k for the league. TEGNA, the local TV station conglomerate in Texas, partnered with local esports teams Houston Outlaws and Dallas FUEL to put on competitions over three weeks and create a docuseries that ran on weekends. Also, sponsorships have continued to pour in to esports since there's scarce opportunity in other postponed sports, with major brands like Nike announcing just this past week a streetwear sneaker deal with the League of Legends 2020 World Championships. 

Additionally, without that sports programming, ESPN and other sports networks have started showing more esports competitions live. However, it's not all roses for the esports world. A common misconception is that esports is perfectly healthy when it is entirely online. As I mentioned earlier, esports wants to be viewed in the same light as traditional sports by marketers (except with an even younger audience), including in-person audience opportunity. Ticket sales, merch sales, visual sponsorships are all big parts of the esports revenue, which accounted for approximately $100 million worldwide in 2019.

Weisler: Tell me about the demos for esports.

Oscar: According to MRI-Simmons' latest report on esports fans, around 47 million Americans are esports fans, which consists mainly of 18-34 year old millennials, who make more than the national average income, which is around 60k. Esports fans skew male, as is to be expected, by a roughly 60-40 split. However, we still need more data and insights into esports fans under 18 years old, since it is burgeoning for younger people. Comscore has been working with Twitch to get more viewership data and put it in context with cross-media viewership data, and YouGov has collected sentiment data on activations within esports, but we’re still waiting to see the bulk of all that. According to Nielsen and Riot Games, the League of Legends North American tournament series is the third most popular league for adults 18-34 behind the NFL and NBA, but the gap is noticeable (around 2.5m for NFL, 470k for NBA, and 123k for League of Legends). If you included people under 18, I bet these numbers would be even closer together. 

Weisler: Where do you see esports 2-3 years from now?

Oscar: According to many projections, esports is set to grow to about $2bn in worldwide revenue, with a CAGR of 23%. I am not sure how that will play out, but viewership will continue to grow as more and more people start to use platforms like Twitch and YouTube for their m
ainstream entertainment. Esports is an integral part of that. Currently, around 500M people worldwide watch esports and that is projected to grow to around 650M in 2023, according to gaming/esports research firm NewZoo. It's hard to know how reliable all these projections are, especially since esports is such a broad bucket of interests, but if history has taught us anything it's that esports continues to draw more viewers over the years.  

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

How Will ATSC 3.0 Impact Local Television?

ATSC 3.0 has been receiving a lot of buzz at industry shows like TV of Tomorrow and CES. Described as a game-changer, this new protocol promises advancements that will enable interactivity on-demand for over-the-air local television.

Experts from the field are often bullish but admit there will be a lot of disintermediation, disruption, and transformation that—at least for the short term—could create uncertainty. Here are some of the anticipated pros, cons, and in-betweens.

Further Consolidation

There could be additional local consolidation by companies like Tegna and Sinclair Broadcasting, which might “enable those companies to streamline content production, content delivery, programmatic buying, and ad delivery from a central location,” said Tracy Swedlow, co-founder and chief executive officer at TMRW Corporation.

This could work well for advertisers by creating cost efficiencies and new opportunities for monetization, but could remove the local feel by leaving office operations to be conducted outside the market.

Read the full article on the Videa blog.

Applying Digital Data to Broadcast. Sinclair’s Creative Data Initiatives Revealed at the Secret Society

Mitch Oscar USIM’s Director, Advanced Television is all about collaboration and sharing of great ideas. His ever expanding Secret Society was created to forward the discussion of data driven solutions by media companies. The June 2016 meeting, held at comScore / Rentrak offices, highlighted those data initiatives that pushed the uses of digital data sets and their insights into traditional media platforms.  

The four presenters were:

       1.       Sinclair Broadcasting used programmatic techniques to insure the delivery of its primary audience guarantee and concurrently improve the aggregation of its client’s equally important secondary target.

       2.       iHeartRadio stressed the emergence of its capability to apply the precision, data and insights of digital and social to broadcast.

       3.       4Cinsights socialization provided Coca-Cola with a better understanding of how it could reach its unique target.

       4.       Roku demonstrated the value of the exploitation of timely registration information of its OTT/ cord cutting/ cord-nevers growing subscription population.

Sinclair – Applying Digital Insights to Buy Broadcast

Sinclair Broadcast is one of the largest broadcasting companies in the country, with 172 stations in 81 markets. Besides being the largest owner/operator of TV Stations, the company also owns The Tennis Channel cable network, American Sports Network and Ring of Honor Wrestling. Its network ad sales team worked with Russell Zingale, USIM Eastern President, and a client to provide a roadmap to buy a footprint by utilizing programmatic tactics.

Their initiative, called “Equitable Distribution versus Equitable Optimization” referenced the usage of data to place commercial spots every week in breaks that maintain the delivery of the primary demo (Adults 25-54) while also providing lift via a secondary demo ( less than $30k HH income).  To do this, Sinclair combined their footprint with Tribune to get nationalized distribution (+75%) for the USIM client (who was not revealed in the presentation). The two station groups together were then able to capture network allocated budgets and the deal was guaranteed on comScore/Rentrak deliveries, “the first time comScore/Rentrak data was used as the primary currency for a national broadcast campaign,” according to Oscar.

Stephen Spencer provided a more detailed summary of the management of the schedule and the results. He explained, “To achieve a schedule and a guarantee, it’s common to do an impartial but otherwise arbitrary rotation. We referred to as equitable distribution which is based on rotation of commercials within a program pod as well as pods within a program applying the precision, data, and insights of digital and social to broadcast. This time, we did a rotation that was still impartial on the underlying age-and-gender-based primary demo, but within that, we cherry-picked on the secondary demo, which in this case was based on income. It took some doing on the math, and this is just an experiment with only directional results, but it looks good. We thought the cherry-picking would raise our index from basically flat to as much as 15 or 25 percent, it actually ended up around 30 percent on average.”

Conclusion

The boundaries of what we can discover by using data creatively are now being pushed by new troves of first party data. The future, according to Zingale and Oscar, is very exciting. “During the Secret Society clandestine gathering, we were able to bring together for presentation purposes four distinct platforms that demonstrated a unique utilization of data,” Oscar explained. “Those were first party, third party, social and registration coupled with viewing and listening measurement,” he added.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com
 

Sinclair Reveals National Capabilities and Data Insights

Sinclair Broadcast Group recently completed a groundbreaking study as part of a US International Media’s Secret Society initiative pairing Sinclair and Tribune stations and using Nielsen and comScore/Rentrak measurements. This study had a clear purpose - Sinclair wanted the ability to attract more national dollars into local and, by using data, enhance the value of their inventory for these national clients.

The project, presided over by USIM’s Director, Advanced Television, Mitch Oscar, convened as a “Data-ist” subgroup this past week to explore the initiative. “We always want to fly visibly under the radar and find the next trends,” posited Mitch. The results, presented by Stephen Spencer, Sr. Financial Analyst, Sinclair Broadcast Group, proved that not only was it possibly to roll up a programmatic buy into a nationalized footprint, it was also possible to measure it, with de-duped data, at a level that offers greater granularity, larger, more stable population sizes for niche targets and less data volatility.

Russell Zingale, President, Eastern Region, USIM, outlined the approach, “We were able to put two stations groups together with Sinclair’s help and take national money and move it more efficiently into local impact. Further, we wanted to be able to use a comScore/Rentrak guarantee to see what we could learn vis a vis Nielsen. This was helpful for our clients and a learning experience for the industry. We wanted to maintain our impression guarantee on our primary demo age and gender but also utilize the behavioral aspects of the consumer target to deliver more in the secondary target without hurting the primary target.”

Going National Programmatic

The first step in a national campaign is to be able to advertise to a national footprint. USIM was interested in working with Sinclair, whose footprint is not quite as national as what was needed - 40% of the country. But in partnership with Tribune stations, the usable footprint expanded to 80% of the country, about the reach of most cable networks. With a nationalized footprint having been achieved and a target audience of downscale Adults 25-54 identified, the next step was to examine the potential results of a campaign using comScore/Rentrak data and Nielsen data.

Maximizing Panel Size

Data has become central to the new technological sales process but the Secret Society has revealed challenges with the data that have previously not been discussed publically. One is the large issue of data duplication that was presented in the previous meeting . For this data sub-group meeting, data stability and volatility was explored. 

Stephen outlined the reasoning for comparing Nielsen to comScore/Rentrak, “We compared panel size for both Nielsen and comScore/Rentrak to establish a baseline to examine stability and granularity of the reported viewing. In the three markets we selected, panel size difference was meaningful: Washington (165,000 homes/comScore vs. 800/Nielsen), Cincinnati (41,200/ comScore vs. 500/Nielsen) and Little Rock (91,700 comScore/ 300/Nielsen). In our opinion the larger the panel penetration in the market correlated to the more stable the reported viewing. We saw less hills and valleys on programs that aired during the same time period across the week.” 

Increasing Data Stability

The three markets in the January 2016 buy represented the three different Nielsen data collection methods. Washington is measured by people meter, Cincinnati is measured by household meter and Little Rock is measured by diary. Campaign deliveries from these three markets with their three different Nielsen collection methods were compared to each market’s STB data, collected from comScore/Remtrak.   The target was a25-54 with incomes below $30k. As Jonathan Spaet, VP Network Sales and Development, Sinclair, explained, “Our retail client wanted to use adults 25-54 in early morning, daytime and fringe in an equitable distribution and equitable rotation. We came up with a schedule and ran the exact same ads on Sinclair and Tribune and analyzed the first week of the schedule using both data sets.”

The results - In the larger markets there was less difference in delivery between the two measurement services but as Nielsen measurement sample size decreased, there was more volatility and bounce, resulting in larger differences in delivery compared to the STB data. The concerns of the agency were flow stability, consistency and granularity (which included how to best combine the three data collections of Nielsen people meter, household meter and diary) and the fair comparison to comScore/Rentrak STB data. This was all achieved. “The biggest issue we have is post buys and stewardship” stated Steve Lanzano, President of the TVB.

Conclusion

Russell concluded, “We need a standard that we can plan against. Agencies have limited resources and we can post on many different metrics. There has to be one way to test and see how it goes and track calls we are getting for our client. We decided to measure our buy on comScore / Rentrak grps which for us had more stability, to see how it drove the business.”

For Steve Pruett, Chief Operating Officer, Sinclair TV Group, this initiative was an excellent first step. “As a result of this project, Sinclair and Tribune will continue to work together to expand our relationship in order to pursue network and programmatic dollars," he stated.


This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com