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Just curious

S

spindoctor1

Anybody else having a hard time selling UK basketball?
Or high school basketball for that matter?
No one gives a damn around this area and it's losing money like crazy.

Thanks in advance
 
Doctor!

It is ironic that now ESPN has been on for a long time, the over-saturation of top NBA and College games have hurt attendance at small college and high school basketball games... When you can get a UK, IU, Duke, North Carolina and the such on TV about every other game, live, it cuts into the local radio dollars of those major college radio networks.... Our problem on UK here in the Evansville-Owensboro market is such: WSON-860/Henderson, WMSK-101.3/Sturgis-Morganfield, WKTG-93.9/Madisonville, WBKR-92.5 & WOMI-1490/Owensboro cross each other's signals and it streaches the sponsorship and listeners... Purdue and IU on the Indiana side of the river have a little tighter belt on handing out Learfield affilates and overlaping... HIGH SCHOOL! I helped get a LPFM on for a local group in a small town who wanted to have it for local sports (primary source)... Get this.. Year two.. The Girls High School team has enough to get their games on, but the Boys team does not!.... The cable access the LPFM guy runs gets enough to air home games delayed of the College Men and Women (Division II).... I have had no problem getting 14 to 15 sponsors on a Class "A" FM for our small college men's team in that town.....It has a good signal of about 40 to 45 miles for listenable voice audio in a car and the tower is 11 miles from campus... We buy the time and resell to the sponsors to cover our costs and I get a little more for doing the play-by-play... Our flagship bumps Purdue for us (we make more for them, I guess?)...They offer the games at a great rate and we do a 30 minute a week coach's show after the Purdue coach's show.... The local AM with a limited night signal that did our games wanted TEN times the money per game and TEN sponsors per game to do 6 to 10 home games a year... Now I have an FM that reaches more and can get the same money per sponsor to do ALL home and road games, one pre-season game and three national tournament games at the end of the season.. We are already looking at adding the women's team on double header home and road games next season... We are also looking at a direct stream for 'games only' on our flagship, since he does not want the BMI/ASCAP/SESAC fees... We can do that through the campus web portal...... Our little LPFM does worldwide streaming... Maybe we can pay for that during games.... I do talk with local radio folks when I am doing a game as a referee and they, too are having a time getting the level of sponsorships they used to.... I need to start a consulting firm on how to sell High School sports at the lcoal level.. We need to lower rates to get 10 to 15 sponsors in smaller markets (four needed for our local LPFM and higher on commercial stations).. Then we can slowly move up the scale each year... We must prove ourselves all over again..... "Skip"
 
The thing is, we have ZERO problem selling anything else, just these damn sports issues.
I am so sick of the community clammoring to hear it (and heaven forbid I should miss a game
and get hung in effigy), but NONE and I do mean NONE of the local businesses support it!
The other dayparts are practically sold out!
It's just ridiculous to even push these games (now at a reduced rate) when no one buys them.
I wish we could completely do away with sports, it's nothing but an never-filled black hole.
I am now done whining, good luck with the selling in your neighborhood!
 
I guess the main thing I see with a nearby AM talker (with a major regional country and no sports FM attached), they try and find parents who have businesses to buy the sponsorship or some connection with players of varsity teams and relatives... That AM I am talking about covers a high school football team that's not won a game in two, plus years...
 
It really depends. I work for an AM/FM combo where business comes to them because they super serve the community, including High School sports and UK. I sell for this combo in an adjoining metro (about 100k population) where our city grade covers well and sales is a challenge. UK sports is one of my programming offerings and the response has been luke warm. My UK competition in this metro is on a worn out AM signal and occasional FM coverage of play by play. My complete coverage on a strong FM should win but I'm considered an outsider. Of course, I'm also competing with about a dozen other radio signals within this metro, cable, print and an adjoining television market that pulls regional money away. The real challenge is five of those radio signals sell inventory with "dollar a holler" spots. When you're charging $18/spot, $1/spot is hard to beat. How do you make money at $1/spot? You don't. When your radio stations are nothing more than a computer in a cubical feeding a transmitter and the owner is a poor businessman anything possible. Just write a check from one cluster to cover payroll of another cluster.

Flashback twenty years ago, I worked on the programming side for the then flagship station of the UK Wildcats where we sold inventory at $300-$500 per spot. We even occasionally ran EKU football games with two other stations in the metro carrying the game and made money. If only I sold back then... (Sigh)
 
We've reached the point where we simply cannot carry UK at this point. Host charges an absolutely unreasonable rights fee for a little bitty market like ours (a hundred bucks a game for football and a hundred and fifty a game for basketball). We can't even get it sponsored for twenty-five bucks a game for four spots. I absolutely refuse to cheapen my inventory...business is entirely too good outside of sports to go the "dollar a hollar" route. I mean, do the math...it would take two hundred spots (that's 50 sponsors at four per game) to even break even after we pay a board-op to run the games. Yeah, right. Not gonna happen on any station I own, ever. If it DID, then everybody in town would be wanting buck spots, and we'd be up the creek. There aren't even enough local avails during a UK broadcast to break even at a buck a bark. Even at our reduced price, we'd have to have eight sponsors to just break even.

I'm totally surprised, too, at the response we've had to High School Basketball. During football season, we turned away a whole lot of business because we stayed sold out. Now, one single sponsor for basketball. I'm willing to take a bit of a loss sometimes in the spirit of serving the community, but there's no way I can eat the losses of running all three local high schools plus UK. I truly wish I could, but it's just not possible.

I'm definitely not one to whine. Business is GREAT at our stations, and as Spindoctor said, we stay sold out during most dayparts. We most definitely super-serve the community, and the community certainly supports us in everything we do, except sports lately. I'm just curious whether or not anybody else is having the same trouble we are. Is it just a problem specific to our market, or are some of you folks having the same problem?
 
A lot could be to budgeting. More coverage with a well rounded ad campaign instead of sinking all of the advertising bucks into a sports package. Host communications also handles the University of Tenn sports and the price for it has climbed drastically over the years. Maybe wrap the footbal and basketball games into one
package for a few dollars more instead of selling them seperately.
 
Where I work we outsourced our HS sports coverage, let them resell ads and they paid us a set fee for the season. Sorta worked, sorta didn't. An Ohio State alumni kicked in for rights fees for Ohio State football for us. Its hard to sell HS sports with 34 night watts.

(Note to thebroker..I'm planning a trip through your area around Christmas, and would love to meet you and see your stations if you're around on the 26th. If you would, drop me a note at gr8oldies (at) yahoo.com. Thanks!
 
gr8oldies...That's the way we've done it in our first year with our NCAA-II/NCCAA-I basketball coverage for our small college... We buy the time and resell... We've covered enough to pay my travel, meals and lodging with the team and put some talent fee cash in my pocket for the play-by-play (even though I am the assistant AD)....I actually own the remote system and if the away gym does not have a incoming phone line, I will cellcast with my free nights and weekends (and a six hour battery upgrade)....
 
spindoctor1 said:
Anybody else having a hard time selling UK basketball?
Or high school basketball for that matter?
No one gives a damn around this area and it's losing money like crazy.
Click to expand...

Maybe it's like the situation in Cincinnati with UC basketball. The local media acts like people actually care about the Bearcats. Channel 19 will lop off the first 20 minutes of the hugely popular 'Cops' if a game runs on too long.

Yet nobody I know gives a damn about the Bearcats.
 
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