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Super Bowl but . . .
Thrilla game had 4th smallest audience in decade
By Carl Bialik
On the field, this year's Super Bowl and last year's game couldn't be more different.
New England on Sunday upset 14-point-favorite St. Louis 20-17, thanks to a last-second field goal, in a game that was immediately hailed as one of the most thrilling Super Bowls ever.
Last year, Baltimore turned a game that was supposed to be close into a dull 34-7 rout of the New York Giants.
On the small screen the two games were essentially identical: Each posted a 40.4/61 national rating.
Yet the games were very different in how the ratings developed for each.
Last year, as the Baltimore blowout developed, more and more viewers tuned out, meaning advertisers who bought at a discount late in the game got burned.
This year, conversely, more viewers watched with each progressive half-hour of the game, with the ratings growing from 37.3/61 for the first half-hour to 43.6/63 for the final half-hour.
"The fact that the game was as competitive as it was definitely helped to retain viewership throughout the game," says Lyle Schwartz, senior vice president and director of media research at the Media Edge.
"Very few times in Super Bowl history have we seen a game come down to the last few seconds. It definitely did keep the consumer involved in the game."
That's the positive spin on what happened.
There is a negative spin.
It goes this way: Had the game been a Rams rout, as many feared it would be, the Super Bowl's ratings might have fallen sharply from last year's poor showing.
Even with the surge in viewership over the course of the game, the 86.8 million who tuned in still made this year's audience the fourth-smallest for the last 10 Super Bowls.
The big winners, then, were the advertisers who bought late in the game; they benefited from the double coup of lower ad rates and higher ratings.
"It was certainly a risk, but I think those who waited fared pretty well," says Brad Adgate, senior vice president of research at Horizon Media. "They should be pretty grateful it wasn't a blowout."
However, with the barrage of new ads during each Super Bowl, it is less important how many viewers see an ad and more important how each viewer who views it responds to it.
To that end, for the last 14 years USA Today has enlisted volunteers to instantly record their reactions to each ad, and then the paper has tabulated the scores and ranked the ads.
This year, there was one clear winner: Anheuser-Busch, which had four of the top five ads.
This year's ads were, on the whole, less edgy than those of recent years, as many ad firms avoided the risk of offending post-Sept. 11 sensibilities.
"Advertisers did err on the side of caution," Adgate says. "There wasn't anything really groundbreaking and also nothing distasteful."
Ironically, the one ad that most analysts labeled most offensive attempted to pay tribute to the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. In the spot, the only slipup in Anheuser-Busch's nine ads, the Budweiser Clydesdales travel to Lower Manhattan to bow before the skyline and the Statue of Liberty.
In the game's other TV plotlines, Fox ended up with mixed results. Its halftime show, featuring U2, trounced NBC's counterprogramming of a Playboy Playmates-themed "Fear Factor."
Fox's show was watched by 89 million, while only 11 million tuned in to see the Bunnies (who were hardly scantily clad for the show's challenges, anyway).
"I thought the halftime show was very well done," says Schwartz. "From a personal point of view, it kept the people in my household at the TV set watching."
However, Fox's epic-length postgame show hurt the ratings for the special "Malcolm in the Middle" episode. While 21.5 million people watched the "Malcolm" episode, that was a far smaller audience than the 43.6 million who watched "Survivor" after last year's game on CBS.
Now, as the hype machine for next year's Super Bowl officially revs up, the question is: Should advertisers fear the dismal ratings at the start of the game or should they be heartened by the boffo ratings at the game's dynamic close?
Adgate expects no lasting effect from the game's thrilling conclusion.
"The Super Bowl's not like the World Series, which is episodic," he said. "This is more like a series of one-night stands."
So while football fans will want to savor the conclusion of this year's game, advertisers might want to keep in mind the game's beginning and its dismal ratings, because that is probably a better barometer of where Super Bowl ratings are headed: to a not-so-super place.
February 5, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Carl Bialik is a New York writer and a regular contributor to Media Life.
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