I'm sure they'll find ways to please advertisers in some other way. The brouhaha boiled over during the Budweiser Shootout last weekend when some of the computer-generated cars popped up on the screen without their sponsor logos. By design, the only logos appearing belonged to sponsors who paid FOX for commercial time during the broadcast. Hill downplayed the flare up, noting the graphics in question appeared on the screen for a mere 20 seconds during a three-hour telecast. But make no mistake.
Most people feel the racing folks got their way.
What you have here is a turf war, one the car owners can't afford to lose. The 4.2 rating is 17 percent better than last year's Shootout on CBS, and 20 percent better than the numbers on CBS in 1999. The 49 metered overnight markets represent 66 percent of the country. A show's rating indicates the percentage of U.S. homes tuned in, while a share represents the percentage of television sets. One overnight rating point equals approximately 675,000 homes.