Men are on stadium seats and women are on couches

It’s true in NFL football anyway.  Men go to games, women watch games on TV.  Just one more nugget in the treasure chest of gender consumer differences.  What prompted this discovery?  The January 28, 2011 Neilsenwire article “Football TV Ratings Soar: the NFL’s Playbook for Success” which talks about the soaring audiences in NFL football.  While the NFL scores ratings touchdowns, we are seeing TV programs in general move to lower ratings as they carve up the audience amongst hundreds of programming options.

Why has the NFL been successful when other types of TV entertainment haven’t?  Well, according to Nieslen, two of the NFL’s key to success are cross marketing (using various TV networks, platforms) and female audience growth.  A further look into unrelated numbers using Sport Business Research Network breakouts of the NFL fan comparing gender percentages of those who go to games versus those who watch them on TV, shows the percentage of females in the  TV audience (41.5%)  as being  larger for TV than attending a game (38.8%).  Not a huge percentage difference unless you consider  the huge  numbers of folks watching on TV versus limited numbers at the games would make the difference enormous!

So forget Venus and Mars.  On our planet, and in football it’s stadium seats and couches!