Olympic Ratings Boost Gives ABC the Thrill of Victory

Thanks to its prime-time Winter Olympics coverage, ABC, which has suffered the agony of three straight seasons in third place, enjoyed the thrill of victory Thursday in winning the February ratings sweeps.

The official A. C. Nielsen Co. results gave ABC a 17.3 rating, NBC a 15.9 and CBS a 14.1 for the Feb. 3-March 2 battle. Each rating point is said by the ratings firm to represent 886,000 homes.

ABC’s triumph marked the first time since its Summer Olympics telecasts in 1984 that it had won a ratings sweeps, one of four months a year in which the audience for every TV station in the country is measured.

“This may be something of a Pyrrhic victory for ABC,” quipped Gerald Jaffe, vice president of research projects at NBC, referring to the $309 million that ABC spent for the Olympic broadcast rights and to estimates that the network will lose upward of $30 million on them.

However, it is “a victory nonetheless,” added Jaffe, whose network is expected to win its third consecutive prime-time season when the current race ends in April.

With seven weeks left in the ratings race, ABC’s sweeps victory sets the stage for a battle that will determine if it wins second place and puts CBS in third in the prime-time ratings for the first time ever.

“I think there’s a very strong likelihood that ABC would finish in second place for the season,” Larry Hyams, ABC’s director of audience analysis, predicted Thursday.

Hyams said that while the Olympics did win the February sweeps for ABC, the network still averaged second to NBC on 12 nights when it aired no Olympic telecasts. This indicates, he said, that ABC’s series programming is getting stronger in the ratings.

CBS research chief David Poltrack, who spoke Thursday at a press conference held immediately after one in which Jaffe discussed the sweeps returns, said anyone who thinks Olympics telecasts don’t help a network “is crazy.”

“The fact is,” he said, “they bring in light (occasional) television viewers, they provide a very strong promotional platform for launching new programs and they enhance (the ratings of) things like the ‘ABC Evening News.’ ”

The real question is whether “that promotional effort can be . . . carried beyond the Olympics” and provide sufficient impetus to improve overall ratings performance, he said.

Poltrack admitted that CBS “loaded up” with special programs this week--the “Bluegrass” miniseries on Sunday and Monday, the “Miss USA” pageant on Tuesday and the Grammy Awards on Wednesday--as part of its post-Olympic strategy against ABC.

“We’re putting a tremendous amount of promotional effort into this week because we want to stop any momentum that ABC got from their Olympics,” Poltrack admitted, referring to the abundance of promotional spots for CBS’ new and continuing programs that ran during those specials.

ABC currently is ahead of CBS in the season-to-date ratings averages by one-half of a ratings point. CBS has to get ahead and stay ahead by 1 1/2 ratings point between now and the season’s end, or it could lose, Poltrack said.

CBS can achieve that increase, he added. “It’s do-able.”

Despite the boost that the Olympics gave ABC’s ratings, the sweeps returns for the three networks show a continuing loss of network audience when compared to the sweeps of February, 1987.

CBS estimates showed that the average combined rating of the three networks last month was 47.1, compared to 49.7 the previous February, and the share of audience also was down, to 73.5% compared to 76.7% in February, 1987.

This year’s estimate was made with Nielsen’s new “people meter” national ratings system, in which participating viewers must actively press buttons on a device that logs who is watching what programs.

ABC’s Hyams said that the new system, now used in about 2,400 homes, has resulted in about a 10% drop in prime-time ratings for the three networks.

The main reason for the drop, he said, is that the current people-meter sample tends to have young, more urban and more financially “upscale” viewers than in past years.

These viewers, he said, “tend to watch less television in general, and less network television, because they have greater access to cable programming.”