TIME WARNER WINS ARENA NAMING RIGHTS
Deals widen Bobcats' TV reach
Fox Sports Net South will air most of the NBA team's games
JEFFERSON GEORGE AND RICK BONNELL
Staff Writers
Michael Jordan, speaks as Bob Johnson listens on Tuesday at the Arena announcing a naming rights deal for the arena, in partnership with Time Warner Cable.
Tuesday night's Charlotte Bobcats game aired on Fox Sports Net South, the team's new cable TV home. Game tickets listed the venue's new name, Time Warner Cable Arena.
Those were the first visible results of two deals announced Tuesday that give Charlotte's NBA team two things it has lacked since its inception: wide TV exposure and a corporate sponsor for the uptown arena.
Time Warner Cable released the Bobcats from a TV contract that kept games out of many Charlotte-area homes, allowing the team to make a deal with Fox Sports Net South, which is available on cable and satellite TV systems across the Piedmont. In return, Time Warner Cable got the naming rights to the arena, which has carried the Bobcats name since opening in 2005.
Executives with the Bobcats, Time Warner Cable and Fox Sports Net South all declined to discuss the money and years involved in the deals, saying only that they were "long-term" and "multiyear."
Bobcats games originally aired on the team's regional sports network, C-SET. Bobcats majority owner Bob Johnson founded C-SET and planned to anchor it with Bobcats games, but the network folded after one season and millions of dollars in losses.
The C-SET idea puzzled some sports marketers, said Don Hinchey of The Bonham Group, a Colorado-based sports and entertainment marketing firm. Still, Hinchey said, Johnson had the benefit of the doubt because of his earlier success in television: He founded the black-oriented BET network.
To make C-SET happen, Johnson had given Time Warner Cable the cable TV rights to games in a long-term deal. Charlotte-based WMYT-TV Channel 12 also airs about 15 games and is available on all area cable and satellite systems. When C-SET folded, Bobcats games moved to Time Warner's News 14 channel. That meant homes served by most other cable systems and satellite systems didn't get the games.
"We had season-ticket holders who couldn't watch our (away) games," Bobcats President Fred Whitfield said Tuesday, adding that restaurants also didn't show games because they weren't available via satellite.
Such limited TV exposure "makes it very difficult to win the audience," said Hinchey, whose nephew Tim is a former Bobcats executive. That should change, Hinchey said, with Fox Sports Net.
"What they're essentially going to be able to do is a relaunch," he said.
`The next best alternative'
Five years ago, Johnson told the Observer, "I don't want to just give in to the notion" of turning television rights over to Fox, the dominant regional sports network in the Carolinas.What changed? "The only thing that changed was we couldn't execute" a competing regional network, Johnson said Tuesday. "So we go to the next-best alternative."
Fox is also more accommodating than Johnson expected in 2003, he said. The network is planning pre- and post-game shows, and will air Bobcats games on its sister network SportSouth if there's a conflict with Atlanta Braves baseball or Carolina Hurricanes hockey games.
Johnson acknowledged that TV limitations have contributed to tepid attendance at home games. The Bobcats rank 23rd among 30 NBA teams in home attendance this season, averaging 14,632 tickets.
"You get more viewers, you get more interest in the Bobcats," Johnson said. "Then you get more people in the arena."
Fox Sports Net South is available in roughly 3.8 million Carolinas homes. But Jeff Genthner, senior vice president and general manager of Fox Sports Net South, said Bobcats games likely will be available in about 1.7 million homes -- 40 percent more than with News 14 -- because cable systems in areas more than 75 miles from Charlotte may not air games.
All told, 70 of the Bobcats' 82 regular-season games will air on Fox Sports Net South or SportSouth next season. Whitfield said Fox will continue using the Bobcats' on-air personalities -- play-by-play announcer Steve Martin, color analyst Henry Williams and sideline reporter Stephanie Ready.
Value hard to determine
The new name for the arena comes at an odd time -- when the Bobcats season is nearly over and after last month's high-profile ACC and NCAA tournaments at the arena have passed. Brian Kelly, Time Warner Cable's senior vice president of sales and marketing, said the company was "somewhat regretful" that it couldn't complete the deal before those tournaments.
"We did everything we could to try and get there for that," Kelly said.
The value of naming rights for sports venues is hard to determine. For arenas in other cities, companies have paid from less than $1 million a year to more than $9 million a year for rights, although most are between $1 million and $2.5 million a year.
In the Charlotte area, Bank of America is paying the Carolina Panthers a reported $7 million a year over 20 years for NFL stadium naming rights, while Lowe's home improvement stores is paying $3.5 million a year over 10 years for naming rights to the NASCAR speedway in Concord.
Lowe's spokeswoman Chris Ahearn said the company doesn't have a formula to measure its return on investment but that the naming rights "really gave us national exposure to a broader audience."
"It's been a great relationship," she said. "It's certainly a source of local pride."
While many venues have naming rights deals inked before they open, Hinchey said it's not unusual for an arena to go a few years without a corporate sponsor. In the case of the Bobcats, he said, companies may have wanted to see how the franchise fared after following the Hornets, Charlotte's first NBA team that moved to New Orleans in 2002.
What is surprising, Hinchey said, is the exchange of TV rights for naming rights.
"It does seem unusual to me in that you have this swap of benefits," he said. "I don't recall anything comparable to this."
But Time Warner Cable's Kelly said the company expects greater exposure from having its name on a venue that hosts not only basketball games but big-name concerts, such as Bruce Springsteen this month.
"Those kind of events are priceless," he said. "I would have regretted it if we passed."
