1. IF YOU’VE SEEN THE NEW CROP OF ADS
for NBC’s upcoming season of Sunday Night Foot-
ball, you may have noticed a heavy emphasis on the
“Sunday night” part, but not so much the “football.”
That’s not an oversight. The strategy is based on ex-
tensive research conducted last year that shows week-
end sports viewing is for many people more about the
social interaction than the game.
Mike McCarley, vp of strategic marketing and
communications for NBC Universal Sports and
Olympics, explained that when the show debuted in
2006, “our summer launch campaign had to intro-
duce what Sunday Night Football was and that com-
mentators John Madden and Al Michaels had moved
from the Monday night game to the new Sunday
night program.”
But this year, NBC is reaching beyond the die-hard
football demographic to generate the broader viewer-
ship it needs—particularly among young adults.
The insights on how to do that were gleaned before
the launch last year. Working with innovation strat-
egy firm Jump Associates, the network sent mem-
bers of its marketing team into nine living rooms of
people in their 20s to observe them watching football
at home and see what the experience was all about
for them.
Then the marketer and consultants convened on
couches in a conference room in Jump’s San Mateo,
Calif., offices decorated to look like a typical liv-
ing room to dissect their observations, review video
of the hangout sessions, crunch audience stats and
brainstorm. The living room setting, down to the
sports magazines on a coffee table, helped the net-
work execs get into the mood and mind-set of their
target audience, said McCarley.
Those insights resulted in the branding strategy
unfolding this summer, which includes a new tagline,
“Sunday Night is football night,” and an entertain-
ment-oriented position, said McCarley. The new TV
work treats the athletes like buddies to each other and
the fans rather than untouchable celebrities, and the
Web site and print marketing treats the lighted foot-
ball field as if it is a stage. (Ironically, the first SNF
regular season game is Sept. 6, a Thursday night. It
also features reporter Andrea Kremer, in addition to
Madden and Michaels.)
“We realized that watching sports on a weekend
night is a social and interactive activity for TV view-
ers,” said McCarley. “Think of Sunday Night Foot-
ball like the Academy Awards show, where friends
gather to eat and talk, root for their favorites and
comment about the action on the screen—except
this event comes every week,” noted Dev Patnaik,
Jump co-founder. “Our research showed NBC that
For NBC, Sunday
Night is More
Than Football
Reprinted from AdWeek, Sept. 3, 2007, copyright by A.C. Nielsen , with all rights reserved.
This reprint implies no endorsement, either tacit or expressed, of any company, product, service or investment opportunity.

2. the game’s real content is the people in the room. The
people watching are part of the show. Sunday night is
not the time for the attitude ‘Shut up or leave the room
so I can watch the game,’” he said. Rather viewers pre-
ferred to talk trash to each other about favorite players
and plays.
Another discovery was that these viewers see them-
selves more as participants in the event rather than as
spectators, said Patnaik. Researchers watched viewers
play Madden NFL videogames while they watched the
live football contests on TV. Good plays were not nec-
essarily defined by what the commentators said, but
by what the viewers had experienced on their video
games, said Patnaik. “For instance, a receiver would
miss a pass and the announcer would remark about
how difficult the pass was, but a viewer would tell his
buddies, ‘It wasn’t so tough. I caught a pass like that
on Madden [videogame] yesterday,’” he said. These
young viewers tend to see themselves as co-owners
of the franchise. For them, the line is blurred between
their group watching the game and the players on the
field, Patnaik added. “It’s an American Idol world for
them,” he said.
The living room sessions also helped the network
get a better handle on what its programming competi-
tion is. Conversations with fans’ friends and spouses
revealed that SNF is not competing with Monday
Night Football, as many people assumed. Its real rivals
are the Sunday daytime games and evening TV pro-
gramming such as Desperate Housewives, The Simp-
sons and 60 Minutes, according to McCarley.
“The word ‘night’ is the key part of our slogan,”
McCarley said. The underlying message needs to be
that football is better at night—the screen is clearer,
the field looks better and with the lights it feels like an
entertainment event. “We want people to go to brunch
during the day and look forward to getting together
with friends to watch football at night,” said Patnaik.
On July 30, the network kicked off the main part
of its ad campaign with TV spots featuring Madden
and Michaels, as well as NFL players Reggie Bush
and Peyton Manning on NBC and NBC Universal
networks such as Bravo, USA and Sci-Fi, and other
cable channels. Its glitzy promotional Web site, Sun-
dayNightIsFootballNight.com, is advertised heavily on
NBC-owned news and lifestyle Web sites. To ratchet
up the buzz, ads have also appeared on TV monitors
in New York and Chicago taxis, in theater lobbies, on
retail store TVs, on airline flight screens and on sports
stadium screens.
The goal is to position the telecast as entertain-
ment for fans and non-fans alike and to drive first-time
viewers to the games by repeating the tagline “with
ruthless consistency,” said McCarley. “We want the
slogan to become part of the pop culture, with late-
night TV hosts making fun of it,” he said.
The digital components for the promotion will
expand over the season to include social networking
as well as lifestyle content on sibling sites, such as the
new “Football Foodies” section on the site for Bravo’s
Top Chef.
TV sports viewing shows no signs of abating, but it
does appear to be getting more complex, according to
a July 2007 study by eMarketer. “Television remains
the leading medium for sports content, but even sports
fans glued to their TVs are engaging in a range of
related activities online and on their mobile devices,”
it read. A poll of fans watching games in spring 2007
showed that 58 percent were instant messaging, e-
mailing or text messaging at the same time.
“Our research showed
NBC that the game’s real
content is the people in
the room. Sunday night is
not the time for the attitude
‘Shut up so I can watch the
game.”
Dev Patnaik
Jump Associates