By kickoff time on Sunday, football fans and casual observers everywhere will be settling in to watch or listen to what is an unrivaled broadcasting spectacle in American sporting culture. Yet for as widely appealing as the Super Bowl has become, there’s still nothing quite like the connection that fans have on the local level with their teams and the broadcasters that bring those exploits to life each week.

And in looking at this relationship through the lens of our portable people meter (PPM) data for Feb. 3, 2013, Nielsen found an interesting phenomenon that occurs each year in the hometowns of the two participating teams: the local radio audience tends to spike at different times than TV viewership does, specifically just before kickoff and immediately after the game ends.

Key Finding Include:

·         In Baltimore, starting around 5 p.m.—90 minutes before kickoff—the radio audience to the flagship station broadcasting the game more than tripled (a 255% increase!), while the main sports station’s audience across town jumped 62 percent.

·         The main sports station in San Francisco that was carrying the game followed a similar pattern: the audience grew by 55 percent for kickoff and 68 percent after the game concluded.

The full Nielsen Newswire post is available at: http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2014/an-audio-playbook-for-the-big-game.html