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One-Minute MarketerFootball Ratings Have a Lot of People Kneeling

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Football Ratings Have a Lot of People Kneeling

Omaha, Omaha, ready, set, hut hut hut.  Next Thursday, the Eagles and Falcons kick off the 17-week regular season of NFL Football. A lot of people have been squawking,  including our president, about the ratings.Students watching American football game at home

I don’t believe kneeling-gate or deflate-gate hurt the NFL ratings. It’s more the reality of the new-age world in which we live: It is cluttered, complicated, media-filled and short on any semblance of an attention span. No matter if the ratings are down, the NFL is still a super-powered media voice in the United States.

To me, there are really 3 main reasons the ratings have dropped:

  1. Too much football. There are NFL games Monday night, Thursday night and Sunday night. Plus a full schedule of college games. The season has expanded and when you add RedZone and Fantasy channels, the football audience is fragmented even further.
  2. Hard to count new metrics. How do you count people not watching at home? Nielsen has always been challenged with out-of-home audiences (at bars, dorm rooms, restaurants), but now there is a larger viewing public watching digitally. So networks like NBC are keeping track of their own numbers and reporting “Total Audience Delivery” including streaming delivery. It may not be independent reporting, but who has access to NBC’s digital metrics other than NBC?
  3. Too much of everything. Tom Brady says the ratings drop is not due to kneeling or too much football. He says there is too much of everything to consume, and that is the cause of the ratings slump. Tom admitted even he doesn’t pay as much attention to the NFL as he used to. I agree, with unlimited streaming of any program or movie and every book and magazine at your fingertips, it can replace watching Browns vs the Giants any day of the week.
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Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle.

After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant.

He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.”

Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.”

One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College.

Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board.

Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.