By now you’ve probably scanned all the breathless predictions about how Thursday’s Chiefs-Cowboys game will serve up as many as 50 million viewers, and while such a massive turnout isn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility, much like an ambrosia salad, the ratings math doesn’t hold up under even the most casual scrutiny.
In order to reach the mark that sports media watchers have been kicking around since the CBS Thanksgiving Day matchup was announced in May, the audience for the marquee holiday slot would have to be improve on the NFL’s all-time record by a whopping 19%. Three years ago, Fox earned bragging rights for scaring up the league’s biggest regular-season audience when its coverage of the Giants-Cowboys centerpiece averaged 42.06 million viewers.
To anticipate improving upon an already-staggering performance metric by nearly 20% is to acknowledge an unfamiliarity with how math works. When CBS first broke the 40 million mark with its 2021 Turkey Day broadcast, the Raiders’ 36-33 overtime win in Big D beat the previous record set by NBC in 1993 (Miami-Dallas, 38.4 million viewers) by 6%. Nielsen’s inclusion of out-of-home deliveries to its national TV sample did a lot of the heavy lifting four years ago, as some 15.3 million viewers (or 38% of CBS’ total audience) took in the action at someone else’s residence.
As much as “out-of-home” deliveries are generally associated with the bonus eyeballs that accumulate in public venues such as bars, restaurants and gyms, Nielsen’s portable data-harvesting tech also allows it to measure viewership that occurs in private homes. As such, the adoption of OOH data has completely transformed the way advertisers think about the NFL’s Thanksgiving feast.
Stands to reason: The whole over-the-river-and-through-the-woods travel dynamic that fuels the annual feast means there are always anywhere from 12-to-40 coats on the bed in the guest room during the fourth Thursday in November. Now that OOH impressions are blended in with the official TV tallies, the people who’ve shed those coats are being credited for their holiday football consumption—which has led to the overstuffed numbers we’ve been seeing in recent years.
And the boost in NFL deliveries has become even more impactful now that Nielsen has upgraded its ratings methodology. Under the new-ish Big Data + Panel scheme, regular-season NFL ratings are up 7% versus the year-ago period, while an expansion of the company’s OOH panel ensures that even more Thanksgiving impressions will be totted up after the dust clears down in Arlington.
None of which is to suggest that the Tryptophan Bowl has a real shot at breaking the wholly arbitrary 50-million benchmark. For what it’s worth, Sportico last spring used unofficial BD+P results from a year ago to predict an average delivery of 43.4 million viewers for the Chiefs-Cowboys showcase. Having since seen the new methodology in action, the ceiling for Thursday’s big game looks to be at around 45 million, which would give CBS a 7% lift over Fox’s three-year-old record.
Rightly so, everyone at the network would be ecstatic at such a turnout, especially since the “50 million” canard is a construct that was plucked out of thin air. To put it plainly, CBS is not guaranteeing its in-game advertisers—which are paying over $1.7 million per unit for the privilege of reaching such a huge audience—that a spot that airs during Thursday’s game will gin up 50 million impressions. After all, what’s the sense of generating such a windfall if you’re just going to have to turn around and issue make-goods to those same advertisers?
However things shake out during the Tryptophan Bowl or in Fox’s early Packers-Lions contest—which itself is all but sure to reach at least 40 million viewers—we won’t have the official numbers in hand for nearly a week after the last of the ambrosia gets unceremoniously dumped into the garbage disposal. (Which is where any dessert made of marshmallows, pineapple and walnuts belongs in the first place.)
Nielsen plans to go over the Thanksgiving numbers with the full forensics kit, leaving no couch cushion unturned in its quest to ensure that every last impression is tallied. While the business of counting the house proceeds, the networks have elected to hold off on issuing any preliminary ratings data, ensuring a sort of unofficial radio silence that’ll continue through the middle of next week. As such, the final BD+P ratings won’t be issued until late in the afternoon on Wednesday, Dec. 3.