Rory Mcilroy speaks in the player championship.
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Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. – Xander Schauffle looked at the press room in the player championship with a doubt expression lying on his face.
“I can get myself in trouble here,” he said.
He laughed.
“I don’t know much about the fan ahead, to be completely honest,” he said. “I saw Jt e-mail When I was home and was trying to get a better experience for fans, but if you ask me specific questions on it, I will fail this test. “
Schauffle did not know it, but he would perfectly capture the current state of PGA Tour TV. If the tournament is successful in its most significant effort to improve golf on television in decades, one of its most important players may never know. But if the tour attempt on TV is unsuccessfulThe tour risks alienating a generation of golf fans, whose patience is already dressed thin, and paying attention from players like Schauffle in the ways that Commissioner Jay Monahan would better avoid.
Good news first. The tournament knows that it should be better on TV, and efforts to get there are leaders AROUND. For years, the biggest problem facing Telekastrat PGA Tour was the same problem facing the tour: it was very big, very slow and very bureaucratic. Most fans realized that advertising were not likely to disappear in an environment where the tournament had to generate $ 700 million in advertising income every year for its network partners. But why this made this tour unable to change nothing that disturbed its most loyal customers?
The tournament presented the Fan Forward program – a study that required answers from more than 50,000 golf fans – almost exclusively to fix it. The program has identified a forward guide for “regulating what can be regulated” in tourist telecasters, in the parliament of many tour executions. These changes, described in The state’s annual speech of Monahan On Tuesday, include more live golf shots, more play-caddie interactions and an increased concentration in line battles. According to many in the tournaments, modifications also include new sequences tested in focus groups showing less knocking strokes and a greater number of golf shooting per minute.
Many of these changes are already on the show, with some others expected to go out this weekend at the player championship. And while the Twitter Golf Army will be facilitated to hear that there is still plenty of space to quote with tournament partners – including after NBC lost a certain moment for tournaments Sunday – there is little disagreement that the survey has already produced welcome changes. Before Henley winner At Bay Hill, the NBC had submitted one of its most comprehensive tournament of the tournament in the latest memory, and its analytical approach to the line, replaced an outdated Golf TV tradition on Friday with something new and significantly more visible.
However, these changes to Golf TV can be best seen as adjustments on the borders. They are fixing Golf TV problems that can be fixed, and that’s good, but they do not fall much to address the proverbial elephant in the room: ads.
As part of the PGA Tour 2019 TV rights agreement with CBS and NBC, networks air between 17 and 21 minutes advertising per hour each week, and on average about 18 minutes advertising per hour. This is an extraordinary “commercial load”, as it is called, and places an equally extraordinary burden for the editorial people responsible for bringing tourist broadcasting to life to knit together something in the remaining 42 minutes that keeps fans engaged.
The problem, of course, is that the current PGA Tour TV car essentially prints money. Eighteen minutes advertising per hour may not be the best way to win an audience but turns out to be a large The way to make everyone in the golf world (tours, networks, players and sponsors) rich. Considering many parts of the professional golf that remain broken as the golf world returns to the player championship week, it is understandable and perhaps for the tournament to see tweaks in that stiff part of its business as beyond the rebuke.
But MUST Advertising be beyond reprimand? This is a different question – and worthy. The state of the state of Monahan once again covered the grazing terrain each year of successful tour efforts with sponsors, including a direct cripple for some new Fortune 500 partners like Morgan Stanley. Clearly, the tour business is healthy in the minds of these “corporate partners” – healthy enough to spend many millions of dollars that sponsor other company events and components.
Considering this position of the commercial force and the negative feelings of fans for commercialization, it is reasonable that the tour supply and demand laws may require a reassessment. Maybe by raising his advertising inventory prices to see if the tournament can be removed by making the same profit difference, but with much less interruption?
“Trade inventory is an element of value that our partners generate through our partnership with PGA Tour,” Monahan said when asked directly about this perspective. “We will do whatever we can to continue to improve and continue to evolve, but we do not make a mistake about it, the commercial underlining we receive and the ability for our partners to be able to express their brand and tell their stories is an important element of how we are able to present the best tour in the world.”
That wasn’t exactly a “yes!” But is it a shock?
“Listen as we look at our business, there are very few interactive positions when you are constantly trying to improve,” Monahan said. “The way I see it is that when we are sitting here a year from now, I think you will see a tour that continues to have a great story to tell about how we are responding in the interest of our fans, our partners and our players.”
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So you are saying there is a chance for a world in which the tour actually THERE fewer ads? Yes, there is a chance – but it depends a lot on the tour that continues to give a story worth paying. It is easy for the writer of this column to dream of a world in which the biggest weeks of the tournament – to say, the series of signing events – are treated as such in the eyes of tour and network sales teams. It is harder to execute that vision in reality.
Still, isn’t it worth following a vision? The tour has long protested that siggies ARE A premium product, so why not appreciate advertising inventory in that way and, in turn, to transmit smelt that way? In the theoretical, signature events will become a virtuous cycle for the tournament, with high -paying advertisers throwing fastballs into the living rooms (and wallets) of unexpectedly loved customers.
Of course, it is easier to sell your high -priced advertising partners when you are ending your shopping end, and this can also be said for the tournament in 2025. Since the provision of open farmers, the tournament has increased 16 percent in Nielsen’s Great Data Panel – and from a lesser difference, but still encouraging Nielsen panels.
This viewing return can mainly be attributed to a successful sophisticated season for signature events, especially in Pebble Beach, who went from three rounds to four to 2025 and also without an exciting victory by Rory Mcilroy. For the first time since they were announced a few years back, the signing events appear to be giving the value of the entertainment. Schedule is more solidarized, stars are gathering more often, and great events smelt Bigger – this is what promised golf fans.
And what is more? Golf fans are listening. There is more progress to be made, and the much larger battles waiting on the horizon, but it seems that the tournament has finally found the backbone for its most important business customers.
PGA Tour’s business on TV is getting a relief.
Whether or not the stars know.
