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>Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch all but said as much last fall during the company’s first quarter earnings call. “Based on our analysis, we were not hitting the advertising numbers due to the WWE audience,” Murdoch told investors last November, which is a roundabout way of saying that SmackDown’s fanbase was too down-market to justify ad rates commensurate with the show’s considerable ratings success. Murdoch went on to add that the drag on pricing was exacerbated by the show’s seeming inability to move the needle on retransmission-consent revenue. Thus, after a five-year partnership, it was time for Fox to move on from the WWE.
>Which is where Fox’s college football portfolio enters the conversation. As was announced earlier this year, Fox this fall will carve out a new Friday night football package that it hopes will out-deliver (and out-earn) the erstwhile time slot occupant.
>From Fox’s perspective, the combination of additional games and the underutilized real estate that is Friday prime—a window that isn’t exactly crowded with live sports options—made this a no-brainer. Fox already is all but synonymous with football, as the sport accounts for more than 60% of the network’s overall consumption, so a push into the wilds of fall Fridays is a good fit for the brand and its bottom line. (While it’s early in the upfront sales process, media buyers say that units in the Friday night games are pricing between $10,000 and $15,000 higher than what Fox was getting for SmackDown.)
>If the new package takes off, Fox will look to leverage its new fall Friday audiences to help further build its Big East basketball deliveries in the spring, which in turn will give way to its Friday night UFL offerings. In effect, Fox will have a new live-sports mechanism in place from September through May of each year. None of this would be possible if the company hadn’t parted ways with SmackDown.
