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The Super Bowl is one of the biggest TV moments of the year. If fans can choose from multiple productions, will it get even bigger?<\/p>\n
CBS Sports certainly hopes so. When the biggest advertising (and, OK, football) event of the year airs on CBS in February, viewers looking for something a little different will be in luck with an alternative broadcast of the game on Nickelodeon airing at the same time as the network broadcast on CBS. The goal, CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus told reporters last month, is to create \u201ca slime-filled festival that will bring a new and younger and even more diverse audience to the NFL.\u201d<\/p>\n
Running an alt cast or alt stream isn\u2019t exactly a new idea in the sports world\u2014since 2021, ESPN has aired Manningcast, <\/em>an alternate broadcast of Monday Night Football<\/em> with famous football brothers Peyton and Eli Manning serving as commentators, and CBS Sports has produced alt casts of several NFL games on Nickelodeon in the past.<\/p>\n But the move marks the first alternative telecast in Super Bowl history and one of the biggest examples yet of the growing trend\u2014a trend that could end up paying off both for the sports leagues looking for fans and the advertisers looking to court them.<\/p>\n \u201cMore content is always a good thing,\u201d Jeff Gagne, SVP of Havas Media, told Marketing Brew. \u201cYou\u2019re adding new perspectives and booths and new guests and people that will appeal to a wider audience, which ultimately, is what every sports league wants.\u201d<\/p>\n While alt casts generally attract smaller audiences than the main event, the numbers can be considerable. The Nickelodeon alt cast of a 2021 NFC wild-card game, for example, accounted for a little more than 2 million viewers of the total 30 million-viewer audience.<\/p>\n For CBS, the Nickelodeon alt cast presents an opportunity to win over new viewers who might not otherwise be watching. As McManus explained it: \u201cIf you create NFL programming that is really appealing to the younger audience, I think that over time that can have a positive effect.\u201d<\/p>\n The email newsletter guaranteed to bring you the latest stories shaping the marketing and advertising world, like only the Brew can.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That positive effect could extend to advertisers, Gagne told us. So far, the plan is that advertisers who bought ad inventory in the Super Bowl get access to both the CBS feed and the Nickelodeon feed, with options to run different creative on Nickelodeon if they choose, John Bogusz, EVP of CBS Sports sales at Paramount Advertising, said last month. (That doesn\u2019t extend to all advertisers, like beer and gambling brands, who will be replaced with other ads or game programming.)<\/p>\n CBS Sports\u2019s view, according to executives, is that the alt cast will help bolster the broadcast\u2019s overall audience, rather than fragment it. \u201cNickelodeon in many ways is additive and an incremental audience as opposed to an audience that\u2019s being taken away from CBS,\u201d McManus said last month.<\/p>\n But some marketers aren\u2019t convinced. \u201cYou\u2019re fragmenting an audience on what really was the draw of the Super Bowl in the first place,\u201d a media buyer who requested anonymity in order to speak freely about CBS Sports\u2019s plans told us. \u201cSo I don\u2019t love it.\u201d<\/p>\n With different viewing environments, different pieces of creative may be the best option, presenting a potentially costly additional factor for brands whose buys ended up being part of the alt cast, the buyer said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not as simple as saying, \u2018Let\u2019s take what we deemed to be our Super Bowl creative and let\u2019s move it over to another environment,\u2019\u201d the buyer said.<\/p>\nTwo-ne in<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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