A Weekend Full Of The NFL Violating Its Own Social Media Video Content Rules
from the hike! dept
We had just discussed the NFL's strange edict to its member teams to significantly scale back the amount of video content they were sharing from NFL games, particularly during lead-ups to kickoff. As the news came out alongside some fairly significant reports of ratings drops for the NFL, many, including this writer, assumed that the NFL thought that such video content was a factor in the viewership decline. The NFL, meanwhile, denied this, instead claiming that the ratings drops had more to do with the election season, noting how many people were busily watching Presidential debates, with many of us watching whatever car-wreck zombie-apocalypse our political discourse has devolved into.
Whether that's true or not, it certainly seems as though the NFL itself does not think of video content and social media as some kind of enemy to ratings after all. Over this past weekend, immediately after its edict to its teams went out, the NFL was pushing even more video content out via social media than it had in the past.
If the league is panicking about the distribution of highlights on social media cutting into ratings, though, no one told their social-media managers, because pretty much every major play in an NFL game yesterday was posted almost immediately to the league’s Twitter account, often with preroll ads attached.
Ok, so what do we make of this? Well, as with many things to do with the NFL, the takeaways are both good and bad. The good is that the NFL clearly understands that video content blackouts are a thing of the past and that such content is a great driver for ratings, and not the opposite. But the bad is that the NFL seems to think that a top-down approach to controlling such content is the best approach to targeting viewers.
And that's just dumb. Not only dumb, in fact, but demonstrably silly. As I mentioned in the original post, the markets that host NFL teams are wildly diverse, from major markets like New York and Chicago -- and now Los Angeles --, to relatively tiny markets like Green Bay and Charlotte. A one-size-fits-all marketing approach never made sense for NFL teams, but before the days of digital media there wasn't a great deal in terms of diversity that could be achieved. But in the social media age? Marketing can be targeted and approached in a way tailored to specific fan-bases and markets. Why in the world would the NFL think that it had a better handle than each individual team, all of which employ their own social media managers, as to how to best drive viewership and attendance?
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Filed Under: football, social media
Companies: nfl
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It's only bad when other people do it.
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Re: It's only bad when other people do it.
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How to, the NFL Inc. way
Subsequently, they adjourned for the day and returned calls to the various franchises seeking clarification. This is when they realized that the videos were necessary, but they just had to keep their hand in the game. Slowly, very slowly, they also realized that the yapping dogs were actually biting, so they said they would send more videos for release in order to quell the angry pack.
They were plenty pleased with their decisiveness in action.
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LOL. At this point they need to evolve a little to reach that level.
When I think NFL I think... Efilnikufesin. Maybe Anthrax's lawyers should intervene.
It's funny to watch these multi-billion dollar companies so scared to try new things.
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no mutual benefits allowed.
The same issue was brought up in a previous TechDirt post about the guy that cut off his business product because someone else (the re-sellers on eBay) also profited.
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Re: no mutual benefits allowed.
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this is not the blackout you are looking for
Maybe they just wanted to sell ads:
"pretty much every major play in an NFL game yesterday was posted almost immediately to the league’s Twitter account, often with preroll ads attached"
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Re: this is not the blackout you are looking for
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