While tens of thousands of fans have been counting the days until the Baltimore Ravens' season opener Sunday, it's hard to imagine anyone happier to see the games begin than Jay Newman, general manager of WJZ -TV.
Newman's CBS-owned station will carry 13 of the Ravens' 16 games this season, thanks to a network contract with the American Football Conference. For Channel 13 that means monster ratings - and a heavy flow of advertising revenue amid the worst economic downturn since the 1930s.
"Nothing on television in the fall comes even close in terms of the magnitude of audience and the value for advertisers to what a Ravens game delivers," says Newman, whose station has a media partnership with The Baltimore Sun. "The Ravens - along with our overall package of 28 AFC football games - means millions and millions of advertising dollars to the television station."
Buddy Roogow, director of the Maryland State Lottery, is one of the biggest advertisers, based on the buy made by his agency this year and in seasons past.
"No one can give us the kind of reach we get with the Ravens," he says. "We've seen the ratings, and the ratings are monstrous."
"It's all about audience and demand," explains Matt Doud, president of Planit, a Baltimore marketing communications agency. "And I think whether you're talking about the Academy Awards or the Super Bowl or the Baltimore Ravens on a local level, they command an attentive audience."
To get a sense of the size of the TV audience for Ravens' football, consider this: The highest-rated Ravens game on WJZ last season had a 37 rating, which means 408,000 TV homes in the market were tuned to the crucial December game against the Pittsburgh Steelers. By comparison, the highest-rated prime-time entertainment program during that same time of the TV year was an episode of the hit CBS drama, "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation;" it had an 18 rating and was seen in 198,000 Maryland-area homes.
Prime time is so named because it is the time of day when the largest and most lucrative audiences are likely to be watching. Yet a Sunday afternoon football game drew twice as large an audience as the highest-rated network entertainment program in the Baltimore market last fall.
The highest-rated prime-time program for the full TV season came in January with "American Idol." But even the season premiere of that ratings juggernaut scored only a 22.4 rating with 244,000 home watching in the market - about the average rating for a Ravens game in the 2008-09 season.
