Dealmaking Wednesday on deck, strong F1 ratings in Vegas, a sustainable Swiss Olympics, end of NBA IST group play and alleged AI writing at SI.
Dealmaking Wednesday on deck, strong F1 ratings in Vegas, a sustainable Swiss Olympics, end of NBA IST group play and alleged AI writing at SI.
Hello and good morning on this Tuesday, November 28th. I am SBJ Senior writer Joe Lemire, filling in for Abe Madkour. We've had Thanksgiving, Thursday, black Friday, cyber Monday, and today's Giving Tuesday, which all leads into tomorrow's deal making Wednesday. Maybe it'll catch on. Indeed, we are on the verge of Sports business Journal's. Next big conference happening over two days in Washington DC in partnership with Monumental Sports and Entertainment, and my fellow native of Lowell, Massachusetts, Ted Leonsis. I'll be sharing the stage with monumental president of Vasco operations, Michael Winger on Wednesday afternoon, and a quartet of successful startup founders on Thursday morning, including Rick Allen of View Lift, Tyree Burkes of Players Health, GHA Lee of Sports Box AI, and Jason Robinson of both Playbook five and the European Football League's, Barcelona Dragons, and that doesn't even include some of the other big headliners, most notably Joshua Harris of the Washington Commanders.
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Hope to see you all there. The inaugural F one Heineken Silver Las Vegas Grand Prix wasn't universally popular to locals who at times complained about the traffic and construction, but that didn't stop a large number of residents from tuning into the broadcast. As our Adam Stern reported yesterday afternoon, the TV ratings in Las Vegas were nearly five times higher than in any other market with a 7.4 TV rating followed by Los Angeles at 1.5. Given that the race didn't start until 10:00 PM Pacific Time and 1:00 AM Eastern time, it's no surprise at six of the top seven markets were in or west of the Rocky Mountains, only the Greenville Spartanburg Market cracked the top 10 from the Eastern time zone. Overall, PN averaged 1.3 million viewers throughout the broadcast. The sixth largest audience on any network this season, of which half were in the 18 to 49 demographic, Switzerland is preparing to launch a bid for either the 2030 or 2034 Winter Olympics that would stand to be the least expensive Olympiad in history.
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Now, of course, these Quadrennial events are prone to cost overruns, but the Swiss sports federations voted unanimously to propose a 1.6 billion bid for a decentralized games that when adjusted for inflation would cost less than any other. The IOC whose headquarters is in La Angeles, Switzerland, is scheduled to determine the finalist bids for these games This week, salt Lake City is among the other contenders. A referendum in Switzerland prompted the organizing committee to withdraw from vying for the 2026 winter games, but this new bid might be more palatable for locals given that no new venues would be built and most of the funding would be supplied by the private sector. Switzerland previously hosted the Winter Olympics in St. Moritz in 1928 and 1948. This new ideation would include events staged all over the country, much as how LA 28 is leveraging a lot of existing infrastructure in a more sustainable format.
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It's building no new permanent venues. Switzerland is now seeking to take a similar tech in the winter. This is particularly important given the forecasts of climate change. One such study conducted by the IOCs Future Host commission determined that by 2040, only 10 countries would be equipped to host the Winter Olympics, the NBA in-season tournament wraps up group play this evening, our Austin Carr purport that viewership is up double digits over Tuesday and Friday, regular season games from last November. The Friday contests of the in-season tournament are up 24% over the comparable NBA games last year. While the Tuesday t and t games are up 7% over last year's average media ACE John Oran wrote that the in-season tournament probably can't be proffered as its own rights package yet, although it has the potential to become such a 10 pole event for the NBA. Iran spoke to executives at T T's parent company and at ESPN who noted the importance of educating fans of what the in-season tournament is.
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While adding that, it has helped build intrigue and curiosity with clear corresponding intensity from the players. The debut hasn't been perfect. Some players have voiced issues about the safety and slickness of the new courts Celtic star, Jason Tatum also critiqued the use of point differential as a tiebreaker as it creates a new incentive structure that has never previously existed in the NBA. That's the fundamental challenge about this having cake and eating at two approach with the in-season tournament games also counting toward the regular season standings. It's a small trade-off and there have been no notably bad unintended consequences from the new schedule attorney format. Thus far, ally, the financial services company is outpacing its own projected marketing spend on women's sports this year reports s BJ's Chris Smith. A year ago, ally pledged a 50 50 split on men and women's spending a milestone it now could reach next year.
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The firm had projected a 40% share for women's sports in 2023 as recently as May, but the success of the FIFA Women's World Cup and NWSL Championship marketing pushed that forward to about 45%. Andrea Bremmer, chief marketing and PR officer for Ally told Chris earlier this month that there's been a rise in support for smaller challenger brands. She said, I look at the legacy media partners as more of what I would call spots and dots, run our spots, make sure we have a presence, maybe do some entitlements with these scrappier closer to the game type of companies. Many of them have athletes involved so they know the stories the athletes want to tell and want to have told. Earlier. This year, the NCAA implemented new best practices for member institutions mandating support for student athletes mental health. One startup that has been meeting that need is the zone and app created by former college athletes that just add three new division one conferences, the Atlantic 10 Patriot League and Mountain West, who all joined the Big East as partners.
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The zone uses both gamification and personalized data-driven recommendations to help users. It can even quickly connect those in distress to appropriate services. For more student athlete mental health S BJ's Intercollegiate Athletics Forum next week in Las Vegas will host a panel with four university practitioners working in this space. Lastly, I am a former Sports Illustrated staff writer, so it was disheartening to say the very least, to read the report from futurism that SI has been publishing articles said to be written by artificial intelligence and adorned with bylines and headshots of people who don't actually exist. Futurism cited two SI sources confirming that AI was used in the creation of this content and noted that when an asked questions of SI's publisher the Arena group, all of the suspicious writers were removed from the website. Only after futurism story was published did an arena group spokesperson reply with a comment denying the allegation of AI stories, and instead blaming licensed content from a third party company add Von Commerce.
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A von has said to have assured arena that all of the articles were written and edited by humans, but that the bylines were occasionally given pseudonyms to protect author privacy. The Arena Group said it does not condone that, which is why those stories were removed pending further investigation. Futurism sources, by the way, disagree with that statement. In any event, I can assure you my kind listeners that I wrote and voiced this morning Buzz cast myself. Without the help of AI of any kind, this is a good opportunity to tout a package of stories scheduled for our December 4th issue written by myself and the rest of the SBJ Tech staff, all about generative AI technology such as Chat, GPT, and how it will and already is impacting the business of sports. For now, this is Joe GPT signing off on today's morning Buzz Cast. Have a great Tuesday and hopefully see you tomorrow in DC.