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ESPN Becomes First Network To Negotiate Deals That Include Out-Of-Home TV Audience
In becoming the first network to "successfully negotiate deals that include an out-of-home TV audience, ESPN's ad sales team this summer accomplished a feat that no group in the history of the medium had ever managed to pull off," according to Anthony Crupi of AD AGE. ESPN took out-of-home deliveries to market "during the summer bazaar, and one major agency holding company agreed to play ball." ESPN Exec VP/Global Multimedia Sales Eric Johnson said that in addition to the agreement it "hammered out with the holding company's agencies, a few smaller shops and individual clients had agreed to kick the tires on out-of-home." He also acknowledged that ESPN was "met with resistance by a number of agencies." Johnson: "We did hear those objections and certainly anticipated that kind of reaction. But this is more than us getting compensated for all those 'lost' out-of-home impressions. It's about capturing consumer behavior in an environment that's changing radically, and learning from the data." Crupi noted in exchange for accepting guarantees that include out-of-home estimates, clients "can expect to get a discount on ad rates for marquee ESPN properties." ESPN Senior VP/Global Research & Analytics Artie Bulgrin said that the out-of-home estimates "would actually be much more pronounced if Nielsen's methodology were more expansive." He said, "Keep in mind that these are relatively conservative estimates." Bulgrin added that the data "only captures out-of-home deliveries in the top 40 U.S. media markets." That "accounts for just 62% of all TV homes." But Bulgrin's team is "not modeling the 40-DMA sample out to the rest of the country" ( <a href="http://adage.com/article/media/a/306100/" target="_blank">ADAGE.com, 9/30</a> ).
