Post-season baseball was a marketing hit for insurers.

Several large insurers were the most prominent sponsors of the new season's most unexpected hit--and one of the oldest "reality shows" around--Fox's coverage of the Major League Baseball playoffs.

According to Nielsen Media Research, four of the five top-rated television programs during the week of Oct. 13-19 were baseball games. The climactic seventh game of the American League Championship Series between the Red Sox and Yankees ranked first with 27.5 million viewers, while the seventh game between the Cubs and Miami's Florida Marlins to decide the National League Championship was second, with 26.5 million viewers tuning in. The first two games of the World Series between the Yankees and Marlins dropped somewhat from that peak, with an average of 20 million viewers, but was still 10% higher than last year's first two games, according to Nielsen.

Throughout this stretch, four leading U.S. insurers--American International Group Inc., Allstate Corp., State Farm Insurance and John Hancock Financial Services Inc.--played prominent roles as both advertisers and direct sponsors of aspects of the broadcasts themselves.

For example, in addition to its ad buys, Allstate capitalized on its famed slogan by sponsoring the "Allstate 'Good Hands' Play of the Game," which was awarded at the end of each game to the player who made the best defensive play.

Although Allstate has been purchasing Major League Baseball ads for several years, this marked the first year that it served as an official sponsor. In so doing, it joins John Hancock, which signed a five-year sponsorship agreement in December 1999 with Major League Baseball Properties.

AIG is a relative newcomer to the field and took a somewhat different approach to its campaign, which seeks to promote the company's auto, life, and retirement and annuities products to a general consumer audience.

Toward the goal of getting the most "bang for its buck," AIG's vice president for marketing, Steven Rautenberg, said the company settled on a unique strategy for its sports-marketing campaign, deciding to focus on buying time that networks usually don't sell: the extra innings.

"The way we saw it, there are two major advantages to focusing our efforts on overtime," Rautenberg said. "First, it is the one time when people are most riveted to the game and least likely to change the channel. And further, because you don't schedule an overtime or extra innings, it tends to be throwaway time for the networks, and we found that we could get better value there because it is time that would tend to go toward make-up ads to other sponsors or promos for the network's other shows."

In addition to the baseball playoffs, the ads have been purchased for broadcasts on the CBS, ESPN, ABC and Fox networks, and they have scheduled for overtime during NCAA and NFL football games, Rautenberg said.

According to the Elias Sports Bureau, a provider of sports statistics and research, 200 of the 2,426 regular-season Major League Baseball games in 2002 went into extra innings, while 25 of the 256 regular-season National Football League games that year went into overtime.

Property/Casualty Marketplace is compiled by Managing Editor Lynna Goch.