This morning at the NAB Show we moderated a panel on how live sporting events are increasingly being broadcast, not on air, but online. Case in point, last week’s first Major League Baseball game that streamed exclusively on Facebook–not on a local station, not on a sports network.
Among the panelists was Sheila Oliver, VP and General Manager of KMSP-WFTC in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Oliver has been in the market 13 years, joining as general sales manager in 2003 and promoted to GM in 2014. After the discussion we continued the conversation getting a sense of the health of the nation’s 15th largest market, Thursday Night Football coming to FOX, and the addition of more news at the duopoly, and 8 other Fox-owned outlets.
Adweek: How is the Minneapolis TV market, from an advertiser perspective?
Oliver: Well, the market is down this year. And it’s softer than we thought. It’s probably more coming from automotive than anything else, but there’s some concern that telecommunications spending is down as well. So now in 2018 we are slated to be in the top 5 for political markets. So it’s going to be very busy starting July 15.
- Related | Adweek: Fox Outbids NBC and CBS to Land Thursday Night Football
Thursday Night Football is going to be a big deal for all Fox stations. What are the plans for KMSP to ramp of coverage?
The Vikings have asked us if we could do a pre-game show with us starting with the first week of Thursday Night Football. So we’re embracing that.
Even if they’re not playing a Thursday game?
Even if they’re not playing. We know we’ll maybe get one game. But they want to be as close to those games as possible.
So that will be at 6:30?
The Fox pregame starts at 6:30, so this will be at 6. So we’ll actually be on for a full hour before game coverage starts. When we started this partnership with the Vikings, we didn’t know then that Fox was going to be this all-in on football. The Vikings are just so pleased they picked us as partners because from the get go it was always ‘what more can we do?’ ‘let’s expand’ and they built this great facility. And between the two of us we can create some really good programming.
We talked about it a little bit in the panel about Facebook. Is Facebook making money for you, or is the strategy that it’s just important to be there?
You know, it’s making some money for us. We sell sponsorships on Facebook where we tie stories to an advertiser, more on the community side than anything else. We have a really huge initiative called Girls, Science and Technology and we put out a lot of content, with sponsors. So we connect advertisers that way. But it isn’t a huge money-maker yet.
But television still is, and Fox announced yesterday that 12 stations in 9 markets, including yours, are adding more news. Talk about how the newsroom is preparing for that.
I’ll start with our duopoly station, WFTC, which is FOX9 Plus. I came up in the world through independent stations in the beginning and see the syndicated market and what’s happened to it. So in markets like Minneapolis were people love watching news, and the ratings are still quite robust in certain dayparts, we see an opportunity for us to go back to the way things were. I mean, 50 years ago. The stations were relevant, in their market, and they were creating local programming that resonated with viewers. WFTC being a duopoly station, we started the news at 7 and now we’re expanding to 7:30. And no one in the marketplace has news on that time of day. 6:30 on KMSP became the second time period that we’re launching. But we have to be careful that we’re not repeating stories, that the content is fresh.
So you’ll be adding some positions?
Yes. We’ll be adding some positions.