Feature: Advertisers Line Up As Euro 2000 Kicks Off

The large television audiences gained by international football matches and competitions are a key bargaining tool for commercial TV networks to squeeze more revenue out of advertisers. Top home nation games can achieve by far the highest viewing figures of the whole year’s schedule, with an audience that is larger than average across the men, women and kids categories. Accordingly, during the Euro 2000 competition, ITV is expected to see its ad revenue for June rise by around £25 million (18%) year on year to approximately £165 million.

It is understood that ITV will is expected to charge a record price for a Network-wide 30-second ad slot in Monday’s England v Portugal match – maybe as much as £350,000. The cost may well pay off for advertisers as the audience figures can be huge. During England’s defeat against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup, viewing peaked at 26 million – one of the highest audiences of all time.

However, international football is not necessarily seen as the answer to all advertisers’ dreams, as ITV discovered in the last World Cup. ITV’s ramping up of airtime prices in anticipation of large audiences caused many fmcg advertisers to move their marketing outside the month which broadcast the majority of the games – June 1998. Also, some advertisers were concerned about the ‘clutter’ of the World Cup environment and also withdrew. This meant that a month that should ideally have been very lucrative for ITV turned out to receive an annual fall in revenue of 6.5% – perversely it was ITV’s weakest June in terms of ad revenue for four years.

Audiences, on the other hand, were very high at an average of 8 hours 28 minutes viewing per person per week – ITV’s average weekly minutes viewing in June since 1995 is 7 hours 52 minutes. This resulted in a very cheap month for those advertisers that actually bought space in it.

Sports events have not escaped the erosion of overall audience sizes that terrestrial TV networks are experiencing due to the rise in multi-channel television. The chart here shows that in 1995, during the Rugby World Cup, average viewing was actually higher for ITV than the 1998 World Cup – in 1995 multi-channel TV homes were much less prevalent than they are now. In June 1994, for example, during the World Cup, ITV’s average viewing came in at just under 9 hours per person per week despite the fact that England failed even to qualify.

Feature: Scott Billings