Who's counting the audience?

12/8/04

The interesting thing about numbers and statistics is that they often can be manipulated to support almost any point of view that anyone wants them to. Sanctioning bodies, television networks or perhaps even some Internet magazines all may be guilty of numbers manipulation for their own benefit. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.

Prior to the start of this NHRA season, I repeatedly heard that there was "growth across the board" in both spectator count and TV ratings for the NHRA POWERade and Summit Sport Compact events. I guess if you say "growth across the board" enough, over and over, that mantra becomes accepted as fact. A number of years ago most motorsports sanctioning bodies stopped releasing attendance figures; all that sponsors and the media had to go on was our own estimates of how many people were in grandstands on any given race day. It was even harder to get real info about TV ratings.

This year I’ve had the opportunity to attend and report on more than a dozen NHRA events -- a lot of great drag racing and a new personal best for attendance! During the year while at those events I would occasionally hear a sales rep or PR type utter the phrase "growth across the board," so, after my eyes rolled back level, I'd pay attention to what the crowd looked like in the seats, not that I'm adept at counting faces in the grandstands. But I could get a feel for the holes, the lack of butts in the seats, and at most of the sport compact events I attended I could easily count the crowd.

Since the mantra "growth across the board" really doesn't say much and nobody in Glendora will make the actual TV ratings public, I had to go elsewhere to get the accurate info. Nielsen Media Research compiles the ratings and companies like Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal and Joyce Julius & Associates interpret the ratings for sports marketers and advertisers.

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Earlier this season we got a sneak peek at what was going on in the Street & Smith article "Spinning Wheels: Motorsports Ratings" indicating a serious slide for the 2004 NHRA TV ratings over the same period in 2003. The ratings for the '04 Gators had plunged downward 45 percent, but that could be attributed to the miserable time of night the coverage aired.

There's an old saying in media and advertising: you can make ratings or research statistics say just about anything you want them to. With this new information on the ratings slide now being public, the positive spin from the sanctioning body then moved to "demographics" and touted NHRA’s target audience as adult males ages 18 to 54. It has been claimed by ESPN, doing a little spinning of their own, that those numbers of 18-45 year old male viewers were actually very strong over the past year and that NHRA Drag Racing on ESPN2 is often the highest rated programming on the network for any given weekend.