Full Throttle

Much has been made recently about this years NASCAR television ratings being down. In most cases, if not all, they are used as a jumping off point for the writer or fan to club HWSBO over the head with.

We’ve all heard and read the rants: “NASCAR is forgetting ‘old time fans.’” “They’re forgetting tradition,” “cookie-cutter tracks are boring,” yadda, yadda, yadda!

In order to perform this linguistic or verbal dance they have to ignore this years ratings are only down 4% which puts them on par with the record year of 2004. The more disingenuous members of this crowd hang their hats on the overnight ratings that are first published by Nielsen Media Research on Monday.

I touched on overnights briefly last year, just enough to conclude they are pure unabashed garbage and anyone that cites them in an argument should be ticketed for gross misconduct by their local debating society.

At that time I decided “we should all chuck the baby, the bath water and any TV ratings reporting out the window.” Well this report out of West Palm Beach Florida has me retinking the issue… but not for the good.

Nielsen Media Research is reporting TV ratings are in for the first half of NASCAR’s Nextel Cup season for the West Palm Beach area. West Palm Beach registered a 64 percent increase in ratings and a whopping 71 percent gain in households compared to 2005.

Astounding you say? I agree until you look at raw numbers and the reasons given for the increased numbers. The raw numbers indicate the increase is due to, wait for it…. a whopping whole 10 households between Boca Raton and Sebastian Florida!

I say again for possible cranial penetration, that’s 10 households, count’em ten. Like less than a dozen. Or less than the IQ of a three-toed sloath. (at least the ones I have met)

How can that be you ask? Well I asked the same question and Nielsen provides the answer.

The West Palm Beach market consists of about 751,930 TV-equipped households, of which 364 have meters installed. This is according to Anne Elliot, vice president of Nielsen Media Research so the assumption is she knows her stuff.

Keep in mind numbers are all projections based off of those 364 metered homes. If the number of metered households watching NASCAR increased by just 10 in 2006, the projected market-wide increase would be 20,000.

And yes you pose the same question I did, what is the increase in West Palm Beach this year? Local-market households watching NASCAR races on NBC and Fox increased from 28,000 in 2005 to 48,000 through the July 1 Pepsi 400.

A nice tidy 20,000 that they claim equates to 10 households. Come on, fess up! Are you one of those ten? Have you moved to the West Palm Beach area in the last year and bumped up the numbers? Or have you just switched from watching “Celebrity Bikini Slugfest 360″ on local cable to NASCAR on Sundays?

Southern migration is one of the reasons given for the change BTW. Brian Lawlor, VP and general manager of local station WPTV-Channel 5 says, “The people who are moving down here from the Midwest or the Southeast have had NASCAR in their lives a lot more than other folks.”

A plausable suggestion I suppose, but I just can’t get the 10 households figure out of my head. It reaffirms in my mind unless you’re a marketing nerd pimping the latest Ken Schrader crockpot or HWSBO (He Who Shall Be Obeyed, a/k/a Brian France) selling the same marketing nerd air time TV ratings mean about the same as the proverbial bear squatting in the woods. Nothing but a steaming pile to be stepped around.

I would be remiss in not mentioning the overall TV ratings. Through the first half ratings are down 4 percent, from 5.6 to 5.3. Average households are down 1 percent, from 76,000 to 74,000. Again that is just about at the 2004 level.

The three biggest losers are Norfolk, Va. (down 29 percent in households, 28 percent in ratings), Philadelphia (down 27 percent in households, 25 percent in ratings) and Atlanta (down 26 percent in households, 28 percent in ratings).

Norfolk is a surprise as it sits just on the northern edge of NASCAR’s hotbed of racing and some of the nations best short tracks are in the area. Philadelphia, you’ll se no surprise in my eyes. Most of the states fans and race tracks are in the western half of the state.

Atlanta I classify as a “special case.” In the last few years it has become politically on par with NYC. When NASCAR was promoting the new Hall of Fame they made tour through Atlanta that included a mini parade of stars and cars. Unlike other stops on the tour the streets were mostly barren of spectators in a mass display of indifference.

Outside of Atlanta it’s a different story as Talladega suggests. Inside the city you’d have better luck keeping your shoes dry while peeing on a flat rock than getting any sustained NASCAR interest generated.