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It’s Warner Bros. Discovery and TNT Sports’ first year of domestic coverage from Roland-Garros for the French Open, but you’d never know it from the way ad buyers are spending.
Amid the preliminaries leading up to the start of the main draw on May 25, Jon Diament, WBD’s evp of ad sales, announced that TNT Sports had sold out its inventory for Roland-Garros to more than 80 sponsors—which is no easy feat considering the breadth of coverage. WBD has planned 300 hours of linear coverage on TNT and truTV and will be streaming more than 900 matches on Max for the first year of its 10-year domestic U.S. distribution agreement with the French Tennis Federation.
“We have this global property around the world exclusively in WBD, so it’s really in our control… you don’t have to share it with anybody who might mail in the first part,” said Diament, noting that WBD’s Eurosport has held international rights since 1989 and distributes the event to 55 countries outside the U.S. “We are the only provider, so we’re going in big with this: We put a lot of chips on the table.”
Roland-Garros ad buyers signed deals including linear, streaming, and digital, which became a Parisian market of options for brands. Streamed matches on Max include all of the French Open qualifiers, as well as pre-match and post-match coverage. Linear coverage, meanwhile, has truTV airing “The Rally” whip-around coverage from 5 a.m. to 3 p.m. ET during Rounds 1-3 from May 25 through June 2. The truTV coverage also includes men’s and women’s singles and doubles through the semifinals, simulcast coverage of quarterfinals and semifinals from international partners, and legends matches.
Meanwhile, TNT features key matches during Rounds 1-4 from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day from May 25 through June 2. It also hosts the quarterfinals through finals of men’s and women’s singles and the finals of all doubles divisions.
All of that coverage gets a boost digitally from Bleacher Report and House of Highlights, which have their own content plans for the tournament. Bleacher Report’s Head to Head mini-game challenges between tennis stars already drew sponsorship interest from Volkswagen, while digital highlights received backing from Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Belgian brand Stella Artois.
Bleacher Report is sending U.S. tennis star John Isner on a series of player interviews throughout the tournament and placing microphones on famous athletes and celebrity spectators sitting courtside. House of Highlights Upgrade, meanwhile, surprises fans on site by boosting their experience, while HoH host Lucas Brody poses players questions they’ve never been asked.
“We focus on the next generation of fans, not just the established fans, and that is rooted within Bleacher Report and House of Highlights,” Diament said. “We always want to be thinking about the next generation of fans that might be watching sports a little differently than grandpa might have watched, and that could be maybe on a phone device that could be shorter content.”
Brand match
WBD walked into a unique position in Roland-Garros, which brings its own sponsors to the gameday experience. However, realizing U.S. audiences likely wouldn’t be of much use to BNP Paribas or Renault—which don’t have much of a market domestically—TNT Sports complemented existing French Open brands with others closer to home.
“For background, at the NCAA Tournament, over 50%—maybe even for the NBA and MLB—are the advertisers that come from league partners,” Diament said. “So our league partners were really limited because it’s a global French tournament, so we had a lot of work that we had to do in front of us to bring in advertisers.”
Stella Atrois stays on as presenting sponsor for studio coverage, as does Rolex as TNT Sports’ game duration/clock sponsor. But D.C.-based Vanda Pharmaceuticals sponsors daytime match coverage for Rounds 1-4. AT&T Business backs the featured matches during those rounds, and Raymond James pays for coverage from the quarterfinals through the finals.
WBD even got Chipotle to chip in and try to capture Roland-Garros’ lunch crowds as a Max streaming coverage sponsor.
“Chipotle is trying to find people that can afford a little bit more of an expensive meal compared to a traditional QSR, so the product will skew a little bit more upscale,” Diament said. “It’s live sports, the time of the year, the fact that the demographics will be 50-50 male-female, and they’ll get to own it on Max from the first serve to the last serve.”
TNT Sports’ roster of Roland-Garros hosts hasn’t hurt its case with advertisers either. At last week’s WBD upfront, NBA on TNT host Adam Lefkoe introduced himself as a member of the French Open hosting team before a segment with Roland-Garros reporter and 2018 French Open finalist Sloane Stephens. While the lineup is peppered with TNT Sports veterans including MLB on TBS’ Brian Anderson and NHL on TNT’s Alex Faust, its constellation of current and former tennis stars includes John McEnroe, Andre Agassi, Lindsay Davenport, Jim Courier, Chris Evert, Caroline Wozniacki, CoCo Vandeweghe, Sam Querrey, Chris Eubanks, Darren Cahill, Venus Williams, Patrick McEnroe, and Mary Joe Fernandez.
“We did bring [the lineup] to the marketplace, so everyone had a shot at buying the inventory. But we have these relationships with some companies like Amazon, DraftKings, or New Balance that, frankly, buy other things from us,” Diament said. “They trust us. They know that we’re going to deliver a first-class product, so we have the upper hand because we run a dozen other sports here, so now we know the folks at Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Lexus, and, because of all that, we can offer them these opportunities. They trust that we will deliver.”
