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ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
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I’m fascinated by the female propensity to watch ads, to the extent that nearly half of all commercials during sporting events are aimed toward women. What’s going on there?
It's a trope as old as cable television, and a true one at that. Jerry Seinfeld joked about it back in the '90s: Men hunt and women nest. I remember my mum constantly complaining that my dad would change the channel any time a commercial came on, her concern being that she'd miss part of the program if he stayed away too long; my dad always countered that he knew the length of the breaks pretty much by heart at that point so no one would miss anything. A friend's mum complained that she'd be watching a show with her husband and would ask what happened to a specific character, only to be informed that that character was in a different show airing on another channel.
With sporting events this tendency is magnified because most sporting events are aired weekend afternoons and evenings, so there's plenty of other sports programming running counter to whatever you're watching, and the temptation is too great to take a quick look at another game. This tendency is magnified further if you're not watching any particular game and just flipping through channels to find something interesting. In my experience, women are more likely to watch a sporting event only if it's a local team or other event that they have a specific interest in, and while men will do the same, they're also more likely to watch a game because it's on television, so there's no loyalty to a specific broadcast. Networks base ad fees on total viewers, but the advertisers know that a certain percentage of viewers are casual fans who aren't going to watch any commercials, period, unless absolutely forced to. So the advertisers are going to tailor their ads to the demographic that's least likely to skip around.
I would also ad that the NFL seems to be the biggest culprit of this (though I don't watch NBA games). I see less of this in college football and national NHL and MLB broadcasts, and practically none in local hockey and baseball broadcasts or PGA and NASCAR. And the female-centered ads during PGA events, rare as they are, tend to be for women's-specific golf products, which makes sense. This seems to make sense—there are only 17 regular season NFL games a year per team, and they're almost all on weekends, so following the sport is much easier for the casual fan. Baseball has like 150 games on television and hockey 82, and some of those games have rather late start times if you're on the East Coast, so it's hard to keep track of things closely unless you're really dedicated. Golf and NASCAR don't have regionally-based fanbases so unless there's a big national star like Tiger Woods it's hard to even know who you're watching, and golf is particularly bad on this front because the field is huge, the events start during the day on Thursday, and most golfers only participate in select events, so by the time Saturday rolls around the leaders could be all guys who are well-known in the golf world but who most people have never heard of. College is better on this front but most college teams don't generate a lot of national interest.
At least that's my theory; it could be totally wrong.
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