With Super Bowl Sunday upon us, it’s interesting and appropriate to reminisce on this year’s NFL season.

It’s understood that no other TV event matches the size and attentiveness of the Super Bowl. In recent years, the annual NFL championship game has attracted more than 90 million viewers and last year’s Super Bowl between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Arizona Cardinals grabbed a record 98.7 million viewers. We expect viewership to top 100 million this year. But did you know that the past NFL season was the most-watched season since 1990?

Here are some other interesting statistics from NFL.com:

16.6 million. That was the average number of viewers for regular-season games, up 14 percent from last year and the highest total since 1990 (though there were fewer potential viewers back then).

105 percent. The difference between the average audience for NFL games and the average of 8.1 million viewers for all the prime-time programming on the Big Four networks during the current TV season (not including NBC’s Sunday Night Football). In 2002, the difference was 52 percent, showing how well the NFL has held up in an age of fractured audiences that has sent ratings plunging for other mainstream programming.

89 percent.The percentage of the time an NFL game was the highest-rated show for the week in each local market. In 2001, it was 55 percent.

Hi-Def = Higher Ratings?
Experts suggest one element fueling the increased viewership may be the growth of high-definition television (now in about one-third of American homes) because they are big favorites among sports fans. While watching the games on my own HD TV does increase my own viewing pleasure, it does not account for why I am tuning in to more and more NFL games each Sunday (or Thursday, Saturday, and Monday). What does? My favorite social media platform that allows me to research teams/players, compile and manage my own “dream team”, and connect with friends from all over the world.

Fantasy Football
Without getting in to the nitty-gritty details, fantasy football involves picking particular players on various NFL teams to create your own team. As the real-life players compile statistics, you get points. You compete with other owners in your league who have assembled their own teams and the team with the most points wins. All of this is done within the social media platform of your choice.

In the last four or five years, the pastime has become much more mainstream, and the services that cater to the fantasy football realm have exploded. An estimated 30 million people worldwide participate in fantasy football; each of those 30 million people have a vested interest in the performance of their players and will tune in to seemingly meaningless games they normally would tune out.

The sky-rocketing popularity of fantasy sports, coupled with the availability of venues showcasing numerous live football games via satellite, has had significant effects on football viewing and rooting habits among participants. While social media and fantasy football are merely two avenues an advertiser can pursue to reach today’s fragmented audiences, the impact cross-media consumption has on television viewership in the U.S. is a phenomenon we have struggled to understand. Looking deeper into fantasy football may provide good insights.

Frank S. Foster at MediaPost serves up some good questions for us to consider:

• What is it about the diversion that affects television viewership so drastically?
• How should an advertiser best leverage this engagement to promote brand messages?
• And in the bigger picture, how are we as an industry going to study interactivity and its impact on viewing habits?

These are just a few of the questions pundits will be tossing around this weekend like a well-worn pigskin. In the meantime, we’ve got a Super Bowl to get ready for…game on!

:: By Marcus Moore, Empower MediaMarketing Client Strategy Associate