The Cleanup Hitters

The reasons for this are simple: A hot prime-time program generates revenue week after week, year after year—as much as $3 million in ad revenues per half-hour show against production costs that average significantly less than $1 million. Because of their enormous rights costs and high production expenses, sporting events are not nearly as profitable.

In the past, other networks have been able to pull themselves out of third place—ABC did it in the 1970s and NBC did it in the early '80s—but that's tougher to do now. The Big Three consistently drew 95% of television viewers 15 years ago, but the proliferation of home TV choices—primarily in the form of cable offerings and videocassettes—has weaned away so many viewers that the networks now draw an average of only 69% of the TV audience. Given the Big Three's smaller share of the audience, CBS's third place in '90 is comparatively harder to overcome than ABC's third place was in '75.

CBS's hope is that prime-time mega-sports will deliver a dependably large number of viewers who, so the reasoning goes, will sample the network's entertainment shows promoted on the sports telecasts and become the base for an expanded audience for them. This worked for ABC when it aired the 1976 Winter Olympics in prime time. The following season, the network, which had formerly been dismissed as the Almost Broadcasting Company, sprang into first place.

However, using sports as a promotional springboard has failed more often than it has succeeded. ABC plugged the daylights out of a red-white-and-blue stinker, Call to Glory, during the 1984 Olympics, but it was soon canceled because of poor ratings. The same thing happened to The Bronx Zoo, which NBC flogged during the '87 Super Bowl, and Grand Slam, which CBS trumpeted during this year's Super Bowl. As Dennis Swanson at ABC once put it: "Promotional value can be an excuse for frittering away a lot of money." Don Ohlmeyer, a former executive producer of NBC Sports, says, "You can get a lot of people to sample a program by pushing it on a prime-time sports event, but you can't make them like it after they've sampled it. You either have good shows, or the promotions don't help."

Of course, CBS didn't accumulate prize events solely as promotional platforms. As Stringer says, "Sports events can accelerate ratings right away. They offer a sudden shock-surge by themselves, and they appeal greatly to young males, which is a section of the audience we haven't been reaching as well as we might like."

And an important sports event is as close to a sure thing in the ratings as there is. "The money is so high for the rights because you know what you are getting," Pilson says. "You will have a strong 40-to-45 rating for the Super Bowl, you will have an 18 rating for the league championship series. Sports are not like War and Remembrance, where you gamble $40 or $50 million and wind up with a total flop. With sports you are buying an assured audience."

Still, each event, each sport, each season is different, and each brings its own unique character to a network. Here are Pilson's observations behind some of CBS's more impressive expenditures:

•The 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville ($243 million) and the '94 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway ($300 million):

"We are dealing in two main elements in all of our biggest properties. One is the Big Event philosophy, and the other is the exclusivity principle. The most significant change in television in the last 10 years is the incredible proliferation of programming. There used to be basically three or four or five signals in the average American home. Now there are 30 or 40. And so many of them deliver so much sports—maybe 20 college basketball games a week in the winter. So how can network sports compete in such an overcrowded environment? By having the biggest events and having them only on our network.

"This is what the two Winter Olympics give us. No one else has them, and we think they are as big as any events ever get to be. And, of course, in keeping with our philosophy of building prime-time ratings, both of these Olympics will run in sweeps-week periods [February] and will help build our season average. We were never as interested in the Summer Olympics because they occurred in July and August, when we simply didn't feel that prime-time results mattered as much."