Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads
The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.
I don’t normally pay a lot of attention to college football coaches when they talk about not wanting to play in conference championship games, or thoughts on scheduling in general. That isn’t their call or their responsibility, and their opinions could change depending on the quality of team they have at the moment.
But I do think it’s notable when you start hearing athletic directors at big-time programs begin to openly call for getting rid of those events…especially in the SEC, seeing as they basically invented the modern Conference Championship Game Extravaganza.
And wouldn’t you know it, but another SEC AD is doing exactly that. Here’s Alabama AD Greg Byrne to USA TODAY:
The boss of Alabama athletics believes the SEC championship game should be no more.
End it.
“I think the ship has sailed. It’s run its course,” Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne said of the SEC championship game, during an exclusive interview with USA TODAY.
…
“It’s a great event,” Byrne said of the SEC championship game. “I don’t like the idea of it going away, but I think it’s reality, with an expanded playoff.”
Back in Ye Olden Days of the 1990s, before the modern BCS and the College Football Playoff, the football conference championship game created an event to not only guarantee another marquee matchup for television, but give schools another opportunity for a championship trophy. In the four-team playoff era, these championship games often served as quasi play-in games, or at least, one last opportunity to improve a resume before selection time.
But in an expanded playoff, the competitive benefit has clearly fallen off. Top teams can certainly “clinch” a spot in the postseason well before any championship game, so a loss could hurt more than a win could help. Plus, with fans contemplating having to travel for multiple CFP games, spending $100+ on a ticket to a conference championship game doesn’t seem quite as appealing.
I completely understand the intellectual argument for ditching these games completely, giving some special prize to the top-ranked team in the regular season, and moving to a 16-team College Football Playoff. You get rid of a series of games that coaches, players and fans find increasingly irrelevant, and presumably, there’s more TV money to be made in an expanded playoff…right?
Maybe. But I’m not convinced the math actually works out. And that’s because of who controls that money
The financial genius of the conference championship game isn’t just that it creates new (and valuable) TV inventory to boost the value of the all-important conference TV deal. It isn’t just that the league controls all that sweet, sweet, ticket revenue. It’s that the conference also controls not just the ticket sale revenue, but all of the assorted marketing value with that event.
The official concessions partners? The ads you see around the scoreboards? The awards, brought to you by such and such a company? Those are all assets that are owned and controlled by the conference, revenues that either fund conference operations, or can be included in school conference distributions.
That’s a lot of money, especially as other leagues (not as much the SEC) kick the tires on potential private capital/equity/investitutional investments. Since the bulk of the interesting MMR (multimedia rights, not broadcast rights) inventory is owned by schools, and not the league, conference championship events are some of the most valuable inventory controlled by leagues.
If you replace those games with College Football Playoff games, well, all of that stuff is now controlled by the College Football Playoff, not the SEC or any specific school. And on the aggregate, I think that may mean less money for each school, even if the TV payout increases.
This is also the biggest reason why college basketball leagues hold conference tournaments, even if they might better optimize their chances for deeper tournament runs by giving their automatic bid to the regular season conference champion. The ticket sales, ESPN (or CBS) broadcast network exposure, and all the marketing sponsorship money end up being more important than the marginal increase from NCAA Tournament units.
Now, money isn’t the only factor. The SEC is rich enough to theoretically decide to endorse a policy that would make each individual school less money, but put their football teams (and fans) in better positions. Alabama could do that. Texas (another conference title game skeptic) can do that.
But can everybody else?
I’m not sure. If other ADs (or conferences) want to start pitching a post-conference championship world, I’d love to better understand their plan for making up all that other money. Or, failing that, a plan to make some cuts to offset the revenue decrease.
That sort of thing is not typically the strong suit of college sports administrators.
Hey, what else happened this week?
I spoke at few pannels at the Online News Association conference this week, and got to meet a lot of smart and creative reporters all across the country. That’s part of the reason why I wasn’t around a computer/phone as much this week, and I’ll be sharing a few thoughts from that event early next week.
We continued our FOIAPALOOZA series that examines operating budgets across a variety of sports with Softball. We’re very close to having every single FY25 MFRS Report from public schools, and now, we can point out how much money you probably need to spend to be in the conversation for an at-large bid in the NCAA Softball Tournament. Coming later this month? Volleyball and wrestling!
We published a smart editorial from Nathan Strauss about how college hockey is organized differently from other college sports, and what everybody else might be able to learn from the sport’s unique relationship with conferences and professional hockey.
I did a reader mailbag, where I answered questions about mid-major conference realignment, EA Sports College Football 27, unique athletic department revenue sources, and more.
And we added over a hundred new documents to the Extra Points Library, from newly hired basketball coach contracts to budget reports and more.
My plan for next week, besides doing more Serious Professional Journalism, is to push a few more updates to our suite of games (especially Athletic Director Simulator 4000), finalize some MAJOR updates to Extra Points Library, and start sketching out some plans for future game projects.
Sadly, I won’t be at either Final Four this weekend, although I understand Friend of the Program KC will be around Indy. But I will be at NACDA, and just might hit the road a bit more between now and then.
Thanks for reading, everybody. Have a wonderful Easter, and I’ll see you on the internet on Monday.
