Last Friday, The Nielsen Company (most famous for its TV ratings) released its annual Guide to the Super Bowl ...which primarily consists of statistics compiled after last year's Super Bowl (...from which we're supposed to extrapolate information about this year's Super Bowl). [Thanks to Rob Kasper for turning me on to the press release via his blog.]Among the guide's findings, "The Super Bowl is ranked 8th among the highest beer selling occasions for the year."
Since I am mildly obsessed with the concept of determining what is the "biggest drinking day of the year" (which, must be noted, is distinctly different than the "highest beer selling day of the year" despite the two ideas being somewhat related), I decided to look into this claim in greater depth.
Shown to the above right is the Nielsen Company's list of "Top Holidays/Events for Beer" as determined by combined beer sales from all U.S. outlets (including food, liquor, convenience and drug) for the "two-week period surrounding the event."
I took one look at this list and though, "Huh-whaaa?!"
The top three look alright, but then everything else seems to go a little haywire. Father's Day at number four?! Easter Sunday beating out Super Bowl Sunday?! I decided to take these question directly to the source...
Is Super Bowl Sunday really only the 8th biggest beer selling occasion of the year? Find out after the jump...
My first suspicion hinged on the word "surrounding." Personally, I took that to mean the week before and the week after an event. And if that was the case, why would sales that occur after an event be taken into account? I can't imagine people buying Super Bowl beer after the game has occurred.
Aaron Lewis, Communications Director at The Nielsen Company was quick and cordial in his response: "We track data in one week increments ending on Saturdays. The Super Bowl was on Sunday, February 3, 2008. [Therefore] we included Week Ending February 2, 2008 and Week Ending February 9, 2008 in our analysis in order to include the high volume of beer sold on Super Bowl Sunday, February 3, 2008."
Ok. Fair enough. That would have been an obvious slip and Nielsen is a respected statistical institution. What other explanation could possibly be behind Father's Day's unexpectedly strong showing?
Well, what do the first three finishers on this list all have in common? They're fair-weather holidays. And though I don't recall ever buying Dad a case of beer for Father's Day or throwing a kegger in his honor, the day that we pay homage to our patriarchs does happen to fall in mid-June (in fact, this year it falls on the first day of Summer!) Easter also finds itself celebrated in a milder month than the frigid doldrums of football's February. Could it be that beer sales are seasonal?
For this inquiry, I was bumped up the Nielsen chain of command to VP of Beverage Alcohol, Nick Lake. "The reason [the Super Bowl] is so low relative to other 'beer' holidays is seasonality," Lake stated via email. "In fact only 22% of all beer sold annually is sold in Q1. The reality is that last year the Super Bowl represented about a 14% increase in sales over any other period in the first quarter."
So there you have it. If you were to normalize sales to account for weekly seasonal changes in overall beer sales, the often beer-centric celebration of the Super Bowl would most likely move significantly up the list.
Mr. Lake also tosses in this little tidbit: "The Super Bowl brings more on-premise consumption than other top weeks given the social nature of the activity, so total consumption (both on and off) would further increase the importance of this event to annual beer sales."
My quest to definitively determine the top beer drinking day of the year may never be fully realized (short of a national census for daily beer drinking -- President Obama, I'm looking in your direction here!), but we're definitely inching closer to an answer.
And at the very least we can say that, yes, when broken down strictly by the numbers, the Super Bowl ranks 8th in beer sales, but I think it's safe to assume that football's biggest day deserves a little higher on an adjusted scale.
[Photo Credit: The Nielsen Company]
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