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Too much spin on Nine’s cricket

Nine Publicity gets carried away with its good numbers for the Ashes, and spins like there's no tomorrow.

2013-12-31_0122Nine’s coverage of the Ashes has been the big hit of the summer season so far.

Yet amid their trumpeting of all sorts of records being broken was this odd claim from Nine publicity yesterday:

Session 3 DAY 3 was the fifth most–watched program on Australian television this year (after The Voice, MKR (7), The Block SKY HIGH & X Factor (7)); Source ozTam. excl Winner Announcements

Take that you AFL, NRL and Melbourne Cup also-rans. Who knew we secretly loved Cricket more?

Of course the claim is incorrect, but here’s the strategy behind it…

Session 3 Day 3 (Saturday) was indeed a bumper audience: it averaged 1.56m metro viewers in preliminary figures, later adjusted to 1.49m. Adding in regional viewers the preliminary number was 2.38m viewers and a national peak of 3.09m viewers. But industry standards are metro averages, not national peaks.

But 3.09m sounds like a great number to lead your press release, so why let industry standards get in the way?

Which brings us back to the bizarre claim about the Ashes being the fifth-best show on television all year….

A Nine spokesperson told TV Tonight, “It was calculating the average of Programs this year, that have been on air at least 2 x times & excluded all winner announcements.”

So a show that has been on once a year (Ashes S3 D3) is oddly stacked up against those that have been on at least twice a year.

Given the Ashes has been going great guns for Nine it’s a little bit disappointing the network has found it necessary to put such a spin on what are already excellent numbers.

No wonder they call it the silly season.

4 Responses

  1. Who do they think they’re kidding – the very people who care about the figures are surely those who understand the figures. If anything with live sport surely channels should be spinning the figures lower to discourage the competition from bidding when the rights are up for renewal.

  2. Typical 9 as soon as they get some good ratings on any programme there attitude is “are we good or not,” but most of their programmes are terrible so I suppose they have to grab anything they can to look good even though they’re not, would love to know what profits from 9 go to the American owners and how much stay in Australia,

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