The Marketing Muscle of Sports - Webcast

We hope you had a chance to attend our Take Five for Your Future webcast, "The Marketing Muscle of Sports" on March 13th. If you couldn't join us, or want to review some of the information again, you can view the complete webcast now. A panel of experts shared their thoughts on the popularity and growth in sports television and how it can be an especially effective marketing tool for advertisers.

Stephen Master, Senior Vice President of Sports at The Nielsen Company, kicked off the panel discussion by sharing findings from his company's State Of The Media: 2012 Year In Sports Report. He noted that brand recall was 10% higher for viewers of sports programming than non-sports programming. Additionally, while sports programming only accounts for 1.3% of all programming, 41% of TV related tweets are about sports programming -- emphasizing the high level of engagement and enthusiasm sports fans have with and about their teams and sports. He also shared more insight into the relationship between social media usage and sports programming viewing during the webcast.

Next up was John Miller, Chief Marketing Officer at NBCUniversal Television Group and Head of NBC Sports Agency, who shared his thoughts about sports as a marketing vehicle and the advantages television advertisers have when their messages are viewed in a sports environment as opposed to within other program genres, which supported the findings from Year In Sports Report that Stephen shared. In addition, John shared how offering programming on multiple screens, as NBC did with the 2012 Summer Olympics, was a strong complement to their TV schedule and increased overall viewership substantially as opposed to cannibalizing it.

Mike Wall, Regional VP/GM at Comcast Spotlight, then shared insight into how the engagement consumers have with sports programming extends to the commercials they view during sports. With the growing amount of sports programming on TV, Mike shared some of the key opportunities advertisers have to reach their target demographic across multiple networks, through special programming or by aligning with a league schedule or finding smaller niche audiences that may watch bowling or hunting programming, for example.

After an informative discussion about the trends and opportunities from our panelists, we opened it up for a Q&A where attendees asked more about multi-screen and social behavior, the impact of live vs. recorded on advertisers and more. To hear our speakers' answers to these questions and all of our panelists' insight on how sports programming presents a plethora of opportunities for advertisers, check out the webcast now.

To download the slides from this or other educational videos and webcasts, please visit: http://www.comcastspotlight.com/takefive