To Reach Men, Advertisers Dial In to Sports Radio

 

ADVERTISING

To Reach Men, Advertisers Dial In to Sports Radio

A Red Sox-Yankees game in Boston earlier this month. Sports radio’s audience skews male and is still a niche segment when compared with the rest of radio, but it is of increasing interest for advertisers.CreditMichael Dwyer/Associated Press

By Jason Notte

·       Aug. 20, 2018

 

Sports programming isn’t the most popular stop on the radio dial in Portland, Ore.

The top sports radio station in June, KFXX-AM, ranked 21st out of the market’s 35 stations, according to Nielsen. Its biggest competitor, KXTG-AM, ranked 22nd. A third, KPOJ-AM, was 25th, just ahead of a jazz station.

Yet the Goldberg Jones law firm in Seattle advertises on all three sports stations.

Rick Jones co-founded the firm in 1996 and helped it establish a niche by providing divorce services for men. At first “the big game was yellow pages” when it came to marketing, he said. Soon, though, the firm turned to radio, which was appealing for both its price and its reach.

“When deciding at that point which stations to target, sports radio stations were a no-brainer because of the demographic,” Mr. Jones said. “The cost per relevant person was manageable and within our budget.”

More than 20 years later, sports radio’s audience remains largely the same. Entercom, the parent company of KFXX, says that the roughly 40 sports radio stations it owns average 11 million listeners per week. Of that audience, 71 percent is male. Ads for Jones’ law firm on KFXX are often bookended by commercials for a chain of testosterone-therapy clinics and for a shaving supply company called Harry’s.

 

“Given the male skew for sports radio, those advertisers may find the format suitable,” says Jeff Sottolano, senior vice president of radio and Radio.com programming from Entercom.

Traug Keller, senior vice president in charge of ESPN Audio and Talent, noted that between 80 and 90 percent of the audience listening to ESPN Radio’s more than 400 affiliates throughout the United States is male. Combined with ESPN’s satellite radio and streaming audio stations, Mr. Keller said ESPN radio reaches one in every five sports-radio listeners ages 13 and older in the United States, and accounts for nearly half of all sports radio listening nationwide.

 “You start to extrapolate out: Half of all sports talk radio listening, 1 in 5 Americans listening to us, 80 to 90 percent male,” Mr. Keller said. “Sports talk radio is probably a good place to go to find men.”

When compared with the rest of radio — not to mention streaming audio and podcasts — sports radio is still a niche, but one of increasing interest for advertisers. John Fitzgerald, vice president of ESPN’s multimedia sales for audio and ESPN Deportes, said that ESPN Radio had about 30 advertisers when he began working with the company 20 years ago. It has more than 300 now, and the field of advertisers has diversified.

“One of the things that advertisers are starting to understand is that sports radio is not your grandfather,” Mr. Fitzgerald said. “We do well with 18 to 49, we do well with 25 to 54, and we do well with 35-plus, but there’s this idea that, this old white guy — and I can say this as an older white guy — and they’re now trapped in what they do and they’re going to do that forever.”

 

 

While ESPN Radio’s listeners are largely male, Mr. Fitzgerald said they vary in race and ethnicity. Fitzgerald also noted that ESPN Radio also has a high number of listeners making between $150,000 to $1 million a year, while Entercom’s Mr. Sottolano said Entercom sports stations and the company’s CBS Radio Network affiliates tend to skew toward the college-educated and households making more than $75,000.

They’re also more engaged than the average radio listener.

“It’s the relationship that a fan has to a sports radio host who, on Monday morning after a big game, is as upset or as emotional as they are,” Mr. Sottolano said. “When they build that kind of relationship and feel that individual is one of them — someone they could have had on the couch on Sunday and been sharing a plate of nachos with — there’s a natural opportunity for us to leverage that trust.”

As a result, sports radio hosts are often enlisted to do endorsements or events. At Entercom’s WFAN-FM in New York, Mike Francesa has a longstanding relationship with the electronics retailer and CBS Radio advertiser Adorama. Angelo Cataldi at Entercom’s WIP-FM has not only endorsed the Philadelphia jeweler Steven Singer on air, but has introduced them as the sponsors of the station’s annual Wing Bowl, a pre-Super Bowl bacchanalia at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center arena featuring exotic dancers, professional eaters and WIP listeners in various states of sobriety.

ESPN’s Mr. Keller said sports radio advertisers once fell into male-focused categories like grooming and beer, but that has changed. The ESPN Radio hosts Dan LeBatard and Jon Weiner, for example, became pitchmen for Zebra pens.

“They did these live reads and all of a sudden, they’re selling a ton of Zebra pens because these knuckleheads said, ‘Hey, this is a good pen,’” Keller says.

That connection isn’t always immediate. Mr. Keller said that ESPN brings many advertisers to its Bristol, Conn., headquarters to sit down with hosts and explain their businesses. The Portland-based Alpha Media, meanwhile, brought representatives from Mr. Jones’s law firm to its KXTG studios to discuss sports-related family law issues, including Tiger Woods’ extramarital affairs.

“Things like that are gold because it’s an implied endorsement and you’re welcomed into the family a bit,” Mr. Jones said. “Especially when you’re in a business like divorce lawyer, the implied endorsement is the one you’re looking for. Nobody wants to be the show host who says “when I went through the worst period of my life, here’s who I used.’”