CBS Gives Pacquiao-Mosley a Prime-time Push at LinesMaker

CBS Gives Pacquiao-Mosley a Prime-time Push

Les Moonves, the pres­i­dent and CEO of CBS Corp., was host­ing Top Rank offi­cials Bob Arum and Todd duBoef at a din­ner in New York in late Jan­u­ary when he spoke words that may ulti­mately change the course of box­ing in the United States.

The meal came only a few days after Top Rank had closed a deal with CBS and Show­time to dis­trib­ute and help it pro­mote its May 7 pay-per-view bout between Manny Pac­quiao and Shane Mosley, which will be held at the MGM Grand Gar­den Arena in Las Vegas.

Top Rank’s deci­sion to move to CBS/Showtime and away from HBO Pay-Per-View, which had dom­i­nated the indus­try for the last dozen years or so, sent shock­waves rever­ber­at­ing through­out the box­ing industry.

Moonves looked at Arum and duBoef and, refer­ring to the May 7 pay-per-view card, said, “We’ll make this work.” And then, in words that box­ing fans in the U.S. have been dying to hear for more than two decades, he added, “I want you guys to fig­ure out how to help me get box­ing back [on net­work tele­vi­sion] on Sat­ur­day night.”

DuBoef had cut the deal with Moonves a few days ear­lier, but its gen­e­sis was at least 10 years prior, when duBoef began to ques­tion why box­ing was so will­ingly push­ing its prod­uct onto pre­mium cable tele­vi­sion chan­nels such as HBO and Showtime.

From the advent of tele­vi­sion through the mid-1980s, box­ing was one of net­work TV’s sta­ples. But then HBO and Show­time came along and, des­per­ate for pro­gram­ming to sup­ple­ment their movie offer­ings, began to broad­cast boxing.

They began to wave large license fees at pro­mot­ers for the rights to broad­cast their fights. And pro­mot­ers eagerly accepted the inflated fees. But to duBoef, it didn’t feel right.

“I looked at it as short-term gain end­ing in a long-term fail­ure for the sport,” he said.

That’s because by leav­ing net­work tele­vi­sion and basic cable and dri­ving the sport onto pre­mium cable, it severely reduced the size of the poten­tial view­er­ship and it elim­i­nated spon­sors, since pre­mium cable has no com­mer­cials. The cus­tomers of the pre­mium cable chan­nels are largely higher-income whites and they miss large por­tions of the His­panic audi­ence and the inner cities, where box­ing is huge.

Ulti­mately, in duBoef’s view, it comes down to a sim­ple num­bers game. HBO has approx­i­mately 29 mil­lion sub­scribers and Show­time has approx­i­mately 19 mil­lion. CBS, which is in the same Via­com cor­po­rate fam­ily as Show­time, is acces­si­ble to more than 97 per­cent of all tele­vi­sions in the U.S. and reaches about 115 mil­lion homes.

Vol­un­tar­ily choos­ing to leave net­work tele­vi­sion, which reached about 2.5 times as many homes as HBO and Show­time com­bined, never made sense to duBoef. Worse, in duBoef’s view, was that by putting the cards onto pre­mium cable, there were no longer sales­peo­ple out in the mar­ket­place try­ing to drum up cor­po­rate sup­port for the sport.

Before long, the per­sons who used to sell adver­tis­ing for box­ing shows had lost touch with it. They didn’t know its demo­graphic. They didn’t under­stand its appeal. As a result, the few times that pro­mot­ers would approach net­work tele­vi­sion exec­u­tives about reviv­ing box­ing on over-the-air chan­nels, the answer was always the same: Our sales­peo­ple say they can’t sell it.

Slowly, duBoef was mov­ing closer to a cliff. Top Rank had long been one of the sport’s elite pro­mot­ers, devel­op­ing megas­tars like Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd May­weather Jr. and Pac­quiao over the last 20 years, but duBoef felt less like a part­ner of HBO’s than he did an employee who was at the mercy of its executives.

There was a con­stant beg for dates and pro­mot­ers com­peted viciously with each other for the pre­cious few avail­able ones. Their suc­cess par­al­leled their abil­ity to secure dates on HBO.

But duBoef dis­liked being at the whim of an HBO or Show­time exec­u­tive, who may not have liked a fight he was offer­ing. Mid­dleweight Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., he found, was exceed­ingly pop­u­lar among his cus­tomers, but he could never elicit much inter­est in him from HBO.

“My cus­tomers loved the guy and the pre­mium cable chan­nels did not,” duBoef said. “I was in a bad spot, because I had to meet the demand from my cus­tomers to see him, but I couldn’t get any inter­est from them to put him on.”

The land­scape began to shift in Jan­u­ary 2010, when, after nego­ti­a­tions to make a match between Pac­quiao and May­weather fell through, Top Rank instead made a match for Pac­quiao with Joshua Clottey.

It was being held on the same date, March 13, that the Mayweather-Pacquiao bout was to have been held, and HBO Pay-Per-View was going to dis­trib­ute. But HBO Sports exec­u­tives declined to do a “24/7″ series around the fight, though they were going to do one had the show been Mayweather-Pacquiao.

Begin­ning with the De La Hoya-Mayweather fight in 2007, HBO’s “24/7″ series had proven to be a hit with box­ing fans and helped drive pay-per-view sales. When duBoef couldn’t con­vince HBO Pay-Per-View to do a “24/7″ on Pacquiao-Clottey, he deter­mined he would finally act on his instincts and shop for a tele­vi­sion part­ner with wider distribution.

Pac­quiao was the car­rot he waved at CBS in an effort to inter­est them. Pac­quiao is one of the biggest global names in sport and is boxing’s biggest attrac­tion. He was the sub­ject of a “60 Min­utes” piece on CBS last year that was watched by more than 16.5 mil­lion peo­ple. He appeared on the cover of the Asian edi­tion of Time Mag­a­zine. He was on the cover of Amer­i­can Air­lines’ in-flight mag­a­zine and was fea­tured promi­nently in a lengthy piece in GQ. He has become a reg­u­lar guest on ABC’s late night talk show, “Jimmy Kim­mel Live,” and appeared for the fourth time on Thurs­day. That is the same day that his sin­gle, “Some­times When We Touch,” a remake of Dan Hill’s 1977 No. 1 hit, will be released.

Top Rank suc­cess­fully pitched Moonves on the idea of dis­trib­ut­ing the Pacquiao-Mosley pay-per-view while com­bin­ing the resources of CBS and Show­time together to help pro­mote the fight.

CBS and Show­time are doing a four-episode pre­view series sim­i­lar to HBO’s “24/7″ that it calls “Fight Camp 360.” The first episode debuted on CBS on a Sat­ur­day morn­ing. The final episode will be broad­cast on CBS live in prime-time on May 6, the day before the event, and will be repeated on Saturday.

CBS aired com­mer­cials for the fight dur­ing the NCAA men’s bas­ket­ball tour­na­ment in March. Its owned-and-operated tele­vi­sion sta­tions are air­ing nightly reports on the Pacquiao-Mosley each night on its 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. news­casts. There are 14 of them in major mar­kets around the coun­try such as New York, Los Ange­les, San Fran­cisco, Boston, Chicago and Philadel­phia, many of which offer lit­tle box­ing cov­er­age otherwise.

In addi­tion, CBS and Show­time agreed to allow Top Rank to dis­trib­ute the event online, which HBO had resisted. Pacquiao-Mosley will be avail­able on their web­sites, as well as on Yahoo! Sports.

Nobody with Top Rank is will­ing to pre­dict whether the col­lab­o­ra­tion will impact the pay-per-view sales. Pac­quiao has aver­aged 1.125 mil­lion sales in his last four PPV fights – 1.25 mil­lion against De La Hoya, 1.2 mil­lion against Miguel Cotto, 700,000 against Clottey and 1.15 mil­lion against Mar­gar­ito – and Mosley has been solid as a pay-per-view seller as the B side.

Early indi­ca­tions are that the num­ber will be strong. Tick­ets for the live show were sold out com­pletely a month before the fight. Already, there are in excess of 7,000 closed cir­cuit seats sold in Las Vegas, an absurdly high num­ber this early since gen­er­ally, more than 95 per­cent of closed cir­cuit tick­ets are sold in the last 24 hours before an event.

Joe Gagliardi, the pres­i­dent of J&J Sports Pro­duc­tions, which sells box­ing to bars and restau­rants around the coun­try, said sales have been far stronger than he antic­i­pated, which he attrib­utes to an early start on the mar­ket­ing cam­paign. Gagliardi said when bar own­ers and restau­rant man­agers are ask­ing him early about a fight, it’s because their cus­tomers are ask­ing them about it.

“We’ve noticed that our sales have jumped up con­sid­er­ably, and ear­lier, than we’ve ever really had, even for a major fight,” Gagliardi said. “Gen­er­ally, my sales are on the last two, three four days, even for a pay-per-view. But, judg­ing by my early indi­ca­tions, I’m above where I thought I’d be at this time.”

He said he’s had a par­tic­u­larly great response from man­agers of chains such as Buf­falo Wild Wings and Hooters.

“They’re get­ting their loca­tions taken care of early, and that has not hap­pened before,” Gagliardi said. “The pub­lic has become aware of the fight ear­lier than nor­mal, so what is hap­pen­ing is that their reg­u­lar cus­tomers are ask­ing if they’re going to show the fight. There is clearly a greater aware­ness of this fight than there has been for most fights, even some very big, very sig­nif­i­cant fights.”

Most cable sys­tems won’t begin sell­ing the fight until a few days before. But Mark Boc­cardi, the senior vice pres­i­dent of pro­gram­ming and busi­ness devel­op­ment for in Demand, said the pres­ence of CBS in the mar­ket­ing pic­ture has clearly had an impact.

In Demand is a con­tent aggre­ga­tor and dis­trib­utes pay-per-views to the cable sys­tems around the coun­try. Boc­cardi is fre­quently in con­tact with cable oper­a­tors and advises them which events fig­ure to be the most significant.

He said the pre­view show that was on CBS, the com­mer­cials that have run and other mar­ket­ing efforts have clearly had an impact.

“I’m in active, ongo­ing dis­cus­sions with all the major cable oper­a­tors and I’m giv­ing them guid­ance on what events we project to kind of be big­ger ones ver­sus smaller ones, so they can more intel­li­gently decide how to allo­cate their mar­ket­ing resources and mar­ket­ing dol­lars,” Boc­cardi said. “They often rely on in Demand for that guidance.

“With respect to Pacquiao-Mosley, there is cer­tainly a height­ened aware­ness about this event. A lot of that is dri­ven by the CBS and Show­time involve­ment. To the oper­a­tors, it feels big. It’s dif­fer­ent. When you com­bine that with Pac­quiao, who right now is the biggest draw in pay-per-view, and Mosley, who over the years has had such great cred­i­bil­ity as a pay-per-view draw, and you put it all together, it just has the feel of some­thing that could be a mega-event.”

Top Rank’s long-range plan is to lever­age Pacquiao’s suc­cess into get­ting box­ing back onto net­work television.

The major task there, duBoef said, is sim­ply con­vinc­ing the net­work exec­u­tives that they will be able to sell their spon­sors on it. Top Rank has hired Lucia McK­elvey as its exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of busi­ness devel­op­ment and mar­ket­ing to inter­face with the cor­po­rate world and hope to inter­est it in boxing.

She’s already had some suc­cess. She has landed an endorse­ment deal for Pac­quiao with State Street Pro­duce. Later this year, it will rename its high-end pro­duce line “Pac­quiao Pro­duce” and Pacquiao’s image will appear on mil­lions of bags of snap peas, cau­li­flower, broc­coli and the like in gro­cery stores around the country.

She’s also landed Pac­quiao an endorse­ment from a For­tune 100 tech­nol­ogy man­u­fac­turer that will be signed this week. She declined to iden­tify it until the con­tract is signed.

Pac­quiao also has a rela­tion­ship with Nike, and AT&T and Tecate are spon­sor­ing the May 7 fight. It is early, but it is the type of progress box­ing needs to show in order to make itself attrac­tive to net­work tele­vi­sion and, more impor­tantly, its advertisers.

In the 1970s, box­ing was a reg­u­lar on ABC, CBS and NBC. The first Muham­mad Ali-Leon Spinks heavy­weight title match was broad­cast live in prime time on CBS. The rematch was shown live in prime time on ABC.

“What hap­pened to box­ing is that it went off ter­res­trial TV and it was put onto the likes of HBO and Show­time and so it went away from main­stream TV,” McK­elvey said. “That means it went away from adver­tis­ers’ inter­ests. They’re most inter­ested in reoc­cur­ring sched­ules, sports like NFL and NBA, Tier One sports that are on in every day homes.

“So unfor­tu­nately for box­ing, it went off main­stream TV and it got put on these [pre­mium cable] chan­nels, where it became a niche. The adver­tis­ers don’t want to buy into that as much.”

The bot­tom line for Top Rank is to use Pac­quiao as sort of a Tro­jan horse to get fans who haven’t watched box­ing reg­u­larly and lure adver­tis­ers who drifted away in the 1980s back to the sport.

If the May 7 fight is as suc­cess­ful as Arum believes it will be, it will open the doors for a return to net­work television.

“Pac­quiao has an incred­i­ble story and we’ve got­ten the word out about him and it’s hap­pen­ing for this pro­mo­tion like it never has before,” Arum said. “That bodes well for the suc­cess of this event, but this also has a sig­nif­i­cance beyond this one fight. If we can make this event suc­cess­ful and show the tele­vi­sion peo­ple and the adver­tis­ers that box­ing works and there is a huge, huge mar­ket for it, there’s a great chance that the result of all this is that we’ll wind up back where we started, on net­work television.”

Related Posts:

• Pac­quiao Adds Rap­per Rick Ross to Entourage
• Pac­quiao Fight­ing for Fil­ipino Awareness
• Why Mosley Is a Good Match for Pacman
• Richard­son Prep­ping Mosley for Fight of His Life
• Mosley Under­stands His Role Against Pacquiao

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