NBC – Don't Gel Too Soon

Women Are 45% of NFL TV Audience. FORTY-FIVE!! Time to Take On the Networks

We need to do something (HINT: #boycottNFLsponsors)

Why is it so hard to affect the NFL and its disgraceful responses to abusive players? After all, women are 45% of the NFL fan base. It makes sense to care what we think.

Sadly, there’s that other thing. To see what we’re up against, follow the money.

Team owners make money from tickets and souvenirs but even more from TV contracts and the networks who pay for them. It’s all nicely divided up. In the 2011 9-year NFL-broadcast contract, CBS gets American Football Conference games – and is asking $500,000 for thirty second spots, according to Forbes, Fox carries the National Football Conference and NBC broadcasts Sunday night in prime time – with ads going for $628,000/30-second spot. Each network gets an exclusive crack at three of the nine Super Bowls and all the revenue that comes with it. (Bloomberg News)

Here’s what Forbes said this time a year ago, “Live appointment television—already extremely important—will only grow in significance in coming years, as television programming and audiences continue to fragment. On TV, the NFL is king.”

This morning (9/15/14) Joe Scarborough, never one for impulse control, lashed out at NYT columnist Alan Schwarz for his mention of the failure of broadcasters to acknowledge their own complicity in the shameful collaboration among the NFL, sponsors and the networks who charge them for their ads.

It’s like the story of the nail and the horse and the war*: Sponsors pay the networks, networks pay the NFL, the NFL divides the revenue among the teams and the owners combine these huge paydays with their ticket sales.

Listen to the Wall Street Journal describe the most recent TV rights auction:

The auction was a sign of the NFL’s huge leverage over television networks, which are increasingly looking to the NFL to help fortify them against the rise of online video services, the stagnation of pay TV and other threats. “It’s almost like the networks are afraid to say no to the NFL,” says one senior TV executive involved in the bidding process for Thursday night games.

So. If the NFL is king and everyone, especially the TV networks who profit from ad revenue, ratings and football programming in general, are enablers then we have to make it scarier to continue than to take a stand. That means finding, and boycotting, NFL sponsors and letting the network brass know what we’re doing. (I boycotted Greece for years during the Junta years. Then an Amnesty International leader told me “If they don’t know why you’re not coming, it doesn’t do any good. You need to write to them and tell them why you’re not there.“)

That’s the other part of it. We need to be noisy and bold and brassy and (forgive me Ms. Sandburg) bossy about this – holler like hell in support of our sisters and put our money where our mouths are. Nobody needs any of the stuff that advertise on NFL games and there are alternatives for all of them anyway.

Women’s bodies should not be paying for the bad business planning of television networks; if they won’t take a stand with the NFL, let them find another way to make their money!

Here are a few major #NFLsponsors — MAKE SURE TO LET THEM KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WHY:

UPDATE: See this Jezebel story on CoverGirl, too.

Microsoft @Microsoft (big deal w/NFL to use ONLY Surface Tablets and other MS technology on the sidelines

Gatorade @gatorade Bud Light @budlight

Visa @visa Verizon @verizon

Papa John’s @PapaJohns FedEx @FedEx

Marriott @Marriott Pepsi @pepsi

General Motors @GM Campbell’s Soup @CampbellSoupCo

#boycottNFLsponsors Please add more in comments!

*For Want of a Nail

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the rider was lost.

For want of a rider the message was lost.

For want of a message the battle was lost.

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Conan versus Jay: Yet Another Generation Gap (see SNL)

What do you watch at 11:30? Are you even up? The Daily Show is over, but there’s still Steven Colbert. Or are you sucked away from basic cable to join one of the Established Hosts on those antiquated broadcast networks? And if you are, which one? The answer to that question probably depends on how old you are.

Last week’s Saturday Night Live included this imaginary Larry King Show, mocking, as both hosts have, the ham-handed dismissal of the younger Conan to honor expensive contract obligations made to the older Leno. For many of us, this is simple: Jay Leno is old and grouchy (well not as old as I am but still…) and O’Brien younger, more creative and definitely holder of the “younger, cooler, hipper” mandate. (Yes I know there’s David Letterman (and George Lopez) but for now let’s think about NBC.)

Younger viewers have been up late watching Conan for years – after many of the rest of us had gone to bed – and they know and like his ironic, goofy, smart persona. The Harvard-educated O’Brien, (who wrote for the university’s humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon,) and served as a long-time writer for Saturday Night live and later for The Simpson’s, is a perfect 21st Century personality.

Leno, on the other hand, is a real 20th Century man. He came up through comedy clubs and Tonight Show appearances and is a car collector and motorcycle freak. His humor is less subtle and, somehow, although less arch than Conan it’s also less friendly. Mostly though, it’s old-school. In my view, it’s for the dwindling older audience and not for the emerging majority of TV viewers (and of Americans) born well after we Boomers had finished college.

It’s funny, but as much as I loathe the idea of age discrimination, I also see this decision as a symptom of a generational division visible in the women’s movement, in life on the Web and in the politics that brought out so many younger voters for Barack Obama and then betrayed them with posturing and partisanship.

I first thought about all this when I saw an interview with the gifted and admired Dick Ebersol, long an icon of sports coverage who has led NBC Sports for many years and presided over several Olympics seasons on the air. In the Huffington Post, he called Conan’s Tonight show a “spectacular failure.” In his long career, in addition to sports, Ebersol was an executive in charge of the TODAY SHOW (full disclosure, I worked for him – and happily) and of Saturday Night Live so he’s no slouch. But it seems that seven months, preceded by a failing Leno show with ratings so bad the affiliates, bleeding audience for the local news that followed Leno, demanded a change, was hardly the best audience-builder for Conan, whose show followed that news. More than all of that though, Ebersol is far from the days when he had his finger on the pulse of the emerging audience, the Gen Xers and Millennials and those younger than they are. They want something different, something cooler, something more like — Conan.

I’ve written about, and been on panels about, the generational divide. The economic crisis has only exacerbated it as young people consider the disappearing Social Security benefits and their own futures in a world where job security and benefits is hazy history. They’re mad at the Boomers, blame us for more than we’re responsible for and often have no idea what we really accomplished in the 60’s and 70’s — for the better. Events like this one, however superficial and entertainment-based, are just another example of the disregard in which they are too often held. NBC will pay for that — in the PR game it already has (did you see the Golden Globes?) and, I fear, in a larger sense, so will the rest of us “older” Americans. We should be listening to them about more than product preferences and if we don’t, we’ll be sorry.

AT TIM RUSSERT’S WAKE: A LITTLE BIT OF HOW IT SEEMED

So many people here and on Twitter have been talking about this; I thought I’d just tell you what it was like.

I got there at around four. The line went from the door to a large room at St. Alban’s School just next to the National Cathedral, where the wake was, up the stairs and a long walk to the driveway, around to the Cathedral front lawn. The last little bit was lined with wreaths – some of them very large – of flowers from friends and colleagues. There were several TV trucks and groups of reporters and camera people on folding chairs under the trees.

This had begun at 2PM and would last until 9 — sad, but not dismal. It was a beautiful day, sunny, breezy, not at all humid – just gorgeous. And we were all grateful to be there. It was a generous thing for the Russerts to do in the midst of their own grief — allowing friends, as well as admirers who’d never met Tim but felt that they knew him anyway — to act on their own sadness.

I talked to some random people in line with me: a woman who’d not known Tim at all but just wanted to be there and, happily, an old friend and pollster with whom I waited most of the way down the hill. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, so we caught up on our lives and our kids and our sadness. I started to tell him about all of Tim’s kindnesses to my boys when they were little; he started to tell me about his son’s internship at Meet the Press. Any one of Tim’s friends would have had a dozen stories just like those.

All along the way, very kind staff and parents from the school, where Tim’s son Luke had gone, were there with name tags that said “volunteer” under their names and offers of help, directions, a place to leave a note for the family, ice water – just gracious and kind. I saw, as we arrived in the room itself, that the casket, covered with white flowers with a note that said “Love, Coco and Luke” was being guarded by what looked like young soldiers out of uniform. I’ve since learned that they are high school classmates of Luke’s who will stand guard throughout the night.

We made our way past the casket in two lines, one on each side. Tim’s wife Maureen Orth was there, thanking people for coming. Then we were out, in a hallway, where another volunteer offered us the opportunity to leave a note on paper that would be bound into a book. The line was long, and each person spent considerable time – the comments were anything but brief.

Just at the end, as we made our way out, stood this photo, the one I used yesterday, up on an easel. I was so glad to see it there – not because I’d used it too but because it was a declaration, which I’d felt and clearly his family felt, that the joy and mischief of this man was what we should take with us back into the world.

Tomorrow there is a small funeral and a memorial service at the Kennedy Center which I’m sure will be amazing. And all of it will help those who loved and admired this larger-than-life presence deal with the reality of his absence.

I want to say that, because of all the posts on Twitter and here on in the blogorama, I felt I was representing many of us and left a note that said as much. It was a privilege to be there.