The Last Dance Demonstrates The Importance Of Examining Holistic Media Value
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
ESPN’s ten-part series focused around Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls for the 1997-98 National Basketball Association (NBA) season was one of the most highly anticipated sports documentaries ever. The ratings for the first two episodes of The Last Dance exceeded expectations and are now the most watched episodes in ESPN’s “30 for 30” documentary series history.
The television ratings, however, are only part of its success. In fact, The Last Dance demonstrates the importance of looking at holistic media to determine the true impact of sports content.
While broadcast on April 19th, The Last Dance was 22 years in the making. NBA Entertainment recorded 500+ hours of video on the final season that Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, and Steve Kerr (among many others) played for coach Phil Jackson on the same championship winning team.
If The Last Dance content alone were not compelling enough, ESPN famously collaborated with its colleagues at Lucasfilm (makers of Star Wars) to promote the documentary and help maximize interest. In addition, ESPN decided to move up the launch of the series from June to April given the impact of the coronavirus on delaying live sports competitions.
The Last Dance’s first episode averaged 6.3 million viewers while the second episode averaged 5.8 million viewers. As context, there have been 157 “30 for 30” episodes in the series history. Viewership for The Last Dance’s first two episodes surpassed all of them with second place being “You Don’t Know Bo” in 2012. That series about the professional football and baseball player Bo Jackson averaged 3.6 million viewers.
Television ratings, however, do not tell the full story. As SportsBusiness Media stated, “[The Last Dance] was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter on April 19, while at one point 25 of the 30 trending topics were all related to the show…Meanwhile, on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, The Last Dance posts from ESPN accounted for a combined nine million engagements. Also two pre- and two post-digital live shows combined for 3.5 million viewers.”
We worked with our data partners and found that the hashtag #LastDance and the phrase “The Last Dance” generated 11.35 billion impressions from digital mentions on April 19-20. Our Corporate Asset Valuation Model (CAV) determined that the media value of these impressions was $5.45 million. The Last Dance’s social and digital success highlights an increasingly common occurrence with sports content: What happens on linear television often reaches a larger audience in social and digital channels.
However, it is not just that sports content like The Last Dance reaches a large audience. This content is often frequently reaching lucrative audiences for corporate partners. We used our Audience Inference Platform (AIP) to analyze the demographic profile of the @30for30 Twitter account. As seen in the table below, the @30for30 audience has significantly higher income and is more highly educated than the average population.
In last week’s blog post, we stated that “While many people are predicting that competition cancellations are creating a pent-up demand for live sports content upon their return, it is not clear how long that demand will last.” While we still believe this to be true, The Last Dance demonstrates that there is a significant demand for new sports content in the near-term as well.
To understand the media value of that content, however, sports media companies, properties, and partners need to examine multiple channels, looking at the audience quantity, quality, and engagement in linear, social, and digital channels.