A Real Player
What One Expert Sees at the Front Lines of the Sports Business

By Ellen Byron
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

For nearly 30 years, Neal Pilson has enjoyed a front-row seat to some of the biggest deals in sports. While president of CBS Sports, Mr. Pilson negotiated broadcast agreements for all of the network's major sports coverage, including two Olympic Winter Games and the first live broadcast of an entire Nascar race, the1979 Daytona 500.

Now heading Pilson Communications, a sports-television consulting firm, the 64-year-old Mr. Pilson finds himself on the other side of the negotiating table, helping clients such as Nascar, the Arena Football League and the International Olympic Committee reach television agreements with broadcast and cable networks.

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Pilson discussed some of the patterns and changes he has observed on the frontlines of the sports marketing and broadcasting businesses.

WSJ: Which sporting event has the most valuable audience?

Mr. Pilson: I think our industry has established pretty well that the NFL probably generates not only the most valuable audience, but also the biggest one. Most sports by definition deliver a valuable audience because they appeal largely to men; men don't watch as much entertainment television as women do. Golf is a very effective means of reaching the well-educated, affluent male. Hockey has been a valuable sport to reach young men. Bowling and boxing can reach men with a different economic level than men who may watch golf or Formula One racing.

WSJ: Have you noticed any sports demographics change in any surprising way?

Mr. Pilson: We're beginning to see that in a number of sports. Nascar is reaching more affluent men and men in urban markets, more so than the sport did 20 years ago. It is all part of more people overall watching sports. We're also seeing more men watching women's sports on television.

WSJ: Why are men watching more women's sports?

Mr. Pilson: They are generally televised on men's channels, and are generally carried in time periods when men usually control the television set. So while women's sports have often believed that they should appeal to the female audience, in fact they are being carried when men are watching television. And this has been a message that I have tried to convey to women's sports: They have to promote their product more to men than they might otherwise think.

WSJ: Is there a bigger marketing lesson to be learned?

Mr. Pilson: People who attend a sports event are a far different demographic from the people who watch a sports event on television. Part of the issue in dealing with women's sports is when you attend a women's sporting event, you may see that the audience is 60% to 70% women and young girls. So these sports thought they had to try to attract women and young girls to watch it on television. However, women and young girls are not watching television on ESPN, and they're not watching on weekend afternoons when women's sports are being televised.

WSJ: What are some of the biggest changes you've seen in televised sports over the course of your career? How has the audience changed?

Mr. Pilson: When I joined CBS in 1976 there were only three channels devoted to the national distribution of sports: ABC, CBS and NBC. There was no Fox, no ESPN, no digital sports channels, there were no regional channels. Our industry has moved from perhaps a total of 1,000 hours of sports programming then to now well over 60,000 hours if you count channels like Outdoor Life, the Golf Channel, TNT, USA and the various digital channels and regionals. That in itself was a huge change in our culture.

Interestingly enough, the audience remains largely men, and you still reach a sport's audience traditionally during the weekend afternoons. But I think it's fair to say that more women are watching sports than 30 years ago, especially since they have a much wider variety of choices.

WSJ: Why is Nascar so popular with fans and sponsors?

Mr. Pilson: I think Nascar's popularity stems from several places. First, it's an everyman's sport. It's not a sport where the techniques are unknown or not understood by the audience; everyone has experienced the thrill of blasting away from a stoplight and almost everyone has also had the heart-stopping occasion where you narrowly avoid an accident. For reasons that perhaps have to do with culture, background and historical perspective, Nascar fans are widely believed to be-and there are statistics to prove this-the most loyal of fans for the sponsors and advertisers who help promote their sport. There is ample evidence that where a beer company supports a given driver, and the driver drives a car with the beer company's name on that car, the driver's fans will buy that beer.