As we noted yesterday, the sports bar “A Bar Of Their Own” – which opened on March 1 to paeons of praise and wall-to-wall coverage from local media – has a unique-ish marketing hook; the TVs are all tuned to womens sports.

That’s all well and good. I support anyone and everyone bringing a new product or service, or bar for that matter, to the market and letting the market decide.

But, again as noted yesterday – if I were the proprietor of another sportsbar, I might be wondering what marketing hook I could come up with to get pretty much every single news outlet in town to come back, not once but several times, to provide breathless, adulatory coverage to my establishment?

“A Bar Of Their Own” (henceforth ABoTO) got the sort of gauzy, soft-focus, “lifestyle” coverage – sometimes not just bordering on cheerleading, but sailing right past it it into borderline unseemliness – that money can’t buy .

But – what if money did have to buy it?

How much free advertising (called “Earned Media”) did ABoTO get over this past few months?

Method To (March) Madness: Advertising costs money. And while rates and revenues have dropped sharply on traditional broadcast and print media over the past decade and change, it’s still not cheap.

So here’s what I did:

1. I took the six biggest media outlets in the Twin Cities, other than Shot in the Dark and the Northern Alliance; WCCO (Channel 4), KSTP (Channel 5), KMSP (Channel 9), KARE (Channel 11), MPR and the Strib.
2. I figured out how many times each of the outlets ran stories on, or prominently referencing, ABoTO. This is the “Story Count” for each outlet.
3. I multiplied the number of stories by the number of “newscasts” on which the piece of hard hitting journalism appeared (the “Newscast/Publication Count” in the table below. (In the case of the Strib, this refers to many days it appeared in the paper).
4. I multiplied the number of appearances by an adjusted, estimated spot ad rate. See “Assumptions”, below. That gave us a “Total Advertising Equivalent”.

Now, the goal is to provide a ball-park figure, not an academic or legal disquisition. But just so we’re clear, I made a few assumptions.

Assumptions: Here’s what I included and excluded, and why.

• I included unique stories that appeared on the station website. Some outlets run the story online multiple times on the same date with different headlines. It’s a marketing thing.
• I counted the number of newscasts that would have likely run the story. (With the Strib, I figured a story would run in one day’s edition).
• I assumed each outlet would run the story for one day’s worth of newscasts. I know that the story ran for longer than one day on some TV stations, but I had no way to measure that.
• I left out longer-form pieces, like appearances on “magazine” or “features” type shows (“Twin Cities Live”, “The Jason Show”, “Good Day” and the like).
• The rates, I fudged – downward. A one minute spot on a major metro TV station newscast runs (according to local broadcast sources) between $1,000 and $1,500. There is of course a quantity discount (and the amount and frequency of some outlets coverage would seem, if only sarcastically, to appy), and ratings do count; I gave a 10% bump to Channel 4.
• The rate and number of appearances on MPR are a semi-educated guess.
• The rate at the Strib is evel less educated, and is based on the price of a prominent display ad.

With all that understood, here are the numbers:

The estimate is inexact – there might be other ways of estimating the numbers, but I can’t think of many objectively better – and I’d be amazed if any of them showed less benefit to ABoTO.

This is the spot where a lesser writer might throw in “doing this is more fun than watching most women’s sports” – but as I noted yesterday, I’m distantly related to women’s nordic skiing royalty, and let’s be honest, who doesn’t love beach volleyball, so I’m going to let that trope go.

Anyway – I guess if you’re thinking about opening a business, the path to free advertising is clear.