Veazey Stole My Thunder But…

The Bulldog makes it to the show! Well not Mississippi State exactly but the Bulldog’s top Dawg, Dan Mullen. When the Gators take center-stage with Oklahoma in tonight’s National Title game State fans will watch anxiously as the newest Bulldog go to work. For those of you who don’t think State has anything to gain… think again.

This morning as I rolled out of bet set to work on this story I received a “tweat” from Kyle Veazey of the Clarion Ledger. I immediately said words that alarmed my wife (Sorry Jenn).

“What’s wrong,” she asked?

I replied by simply saying, ‘Veazey stole my story!’

The truth be told… he just wrote the story before I could. Dang you Veazey!

Now back to the story…

“Sports Marketing” is big business. Bowl games have gone from the Peach Bowl to the Chic-Fil-A Bowl and stadiums now have corporations attached to the names. If you can put a logo on it there is a company will to pay to do so. And there is a value for all of it.

Think about it… with the television packages and the national audiences that watch sporting events millions of rabid sports fans are glued to the tube to watch their favorite team take the field, court, or track.

What is this exposure worth?

Well they say ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, but Joyce Julius & Associates help companies place a value a logo or name appearing during a TV or radio broadcast and printed materials.

While Bulldawg Junction is certainly no Joyce Julius & Associates we do have an interest in knowing what the Bulldogs have to gain when you hear announcers say, ‘Dan Mullen is off to Mississippi State as their next head coach.’

So to determine this we called Eric Wright of Joyce Julius & Associates to find out exactly what the Bulldogs have to gain in free exposure.

“First you have to understand that what we are looking at is different than pure paid advertising,” said Wright the Vice President of Research & Development. “A full price ad will range from $900,000.00 to $1,000,000.00 for a :30 commercial. And in this case we would be talking about a single mention.

“We will look at the value of a :30 paid and equate that to a mention. We feel the value is 1/3 of a :30 commercial.”

I’m no math whiz… but roughly $300,000 in free advertising sounds about right.

So when you hear, “Dan Mullen to Mississippi State,” mark that down as another $300,000 in exposure for the Bulldogs.

Certainly this isn’t a hard fast scientific process we are going through here, but it is easy to see there is a lot of exposure at stake for Mississippi State. The better the Gator offense plays the more praise Dan Mullen will receive, thus more exposure for the Bulldogs.

It could be a big night for the Bulldogs … so tonight I’ve got a homework project for you. Well at least I have a homework project for myself.

I’ll have a notebook in hand with tally marks for each time they say, Dan Mullen, Mississippi State or anything that can remotely be connected to the Bulldogs. We’ll compare notes on Friday morning.

So, despite the fact that Veazey stole my thunder and ruined what promised to be a good story… I guess I’ll have to get over it. Since we are riding in the same car to Arkansas for Saturday’s game with Arkansas… I’ll have plenty of time to verbally abuse him then.

Other random notes…
Ed Wright also stated that 19 schools were mentioned during last year’s broadcast not counting LSU and Ohio State. So it is likely several schools will see the spotlight during the evening festivities.

According to Kyle Veazey’s article this morning there will be over 20 million viewers watching tonight’s title game… all being exposed to the Bulldogs indirectly.

Also stolen from Veazey’s Blog… “So can I provide you a hard and fast, per-second number? Nah. But let's close with some numbers worth mentioning. According to some reports, a 30-second advertisement on Fox's broadcast of last year's national title game cost $950,000. Even with the foundering economy, here's thinking that price increased, if only a little. So if a 30-second spot cost $1 million, that's essentially meaning that each second spent talking about Mississippi State is worth $33,333.33 — though, as Pilson points out, that's some fairly fuzzy math. And it's not like you can put it in the bank.”