Fox Sports Has Sold 90% of Its MLB Regular Season Ad Inventory

Networks have been eagerly awaiting the return of live sports to their airwaves and the billions in dormant national ad revenue those games bring with them, reports AdWeek.

For Fox Sports, that much-anticipated moment arrives Saturday, as it kicks off its Major League Baseball regular season coverage with a quadruple-header: three consecutive games on Fox followed by a nightcap on Fox Sports 1.

Advertisers have rushed to take advantage of MLB’s return to TV. “We’re well over 90% sold out for the regular season, with a lot more business working,” said Seth Winter, evp of sports sales at Fox Sports, calling the advertiser interest “beyond our wildest dreams.”

Close to 75% of Fox Sports’ MLB inventory was sold prior to the March shutdown and in last year’s upfront, with other 20% or so coming as a result of talks that heated up as summer training opened and advertisers saw “proof of performance,” said Winter. “I think the marketplace has been waiting to see that Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, all the other sports can get on the fields of play and compete.”

That recent interest included several new advertisers and strong demand from technology, hardware, retail and insurance categories. The MLB games will also feature more national political advertising than in previous presidential elections.

Winter and his team are also in talks for the coming NFL season. Fox’s first America’s Game of the Week matchup on Sept. 13 will feature Tom Brady and his new team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, facing off against Drew Brees and the New Orleans Saints. Fox began meeting with agencies in May following the football schedule release to jumpstart this season’s NFL talks.

“Early indications are that it’s going to be a very good NFL marketplace,” said Winter, who expects that, like baseball, “people want to be comfortable that we will have a product on the field.”

As fall approaches, “people are really interested in sports because that’s the last real scaled event programming that they can invest in,” said Winter.

Meanwhile, college football’s return this fall is much more of a question mark than the NFL’s.