Miss America pageant announces 3-year deal with ABC
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on November 23, 2015 at 2:39 PM, updated November 23, 2015 at 3:11 PM
There she is — for at least three more years.
Miss America will remain a live television event as part of a three-year deal with ABC, the pageant organization announced today.
The pageant has aired on ABC every year since 2011 and made its big return to Atlantic City from Las Vegas in 2013.
What remains unclear is the nature of the pageant's future in Atlantic City.
Kelley Johnson used an autobiographical anecdote as her talent
The Casino Reinvestment Development Authority and the Atlantic City-based Miss America Organization are still in negotiations to extend the pageant's contract with the city on the heels of what has been a period of sustained loss for the casino economy. The pageant came back to Atlantic City with a three-year contract that ended in 2015, which provided $2.1 million dollars each year to Miss America to underwrite the cost of producing the show.
Miss America partnered with Dick Clark Productions in 2014 to market the pageant and raise the aging event's pop culture profile. The resulting relationship saw Miss America pop up at the American Music Awards and Billboard Music Awards after the pageant took hits from a scathing appraisal of its scholarship program by news satirist John Oliver and hazing allegations issued early in the reign of Kira Kazantsev, Miss America 2015.
The Atlantic City pageant managed to retain its audience in the face of competition
The new deal with ABC means the pageant will continue to be broadcast on the network through Miss America 2019, which, if the current schedule holds, should be in September of 2018.
"We are now poised to continue our successful rebranding of Miss America for three more years with our good friends at Dick Clark productions as we journey onward towards our 100th anniversary," said Sam Haskell, CEO of the Miss America organization, in a statement.
"We look forward to growing the Miss America legacy for years to come," added Mike Mahan, president of Dick Clark Productions.
The Miss America pageant's ratings dropped to all-time lows in the years before it returned to network TV from cable. Returning to ABC, the pageant saw gains, but nothing resembling the approximately 27 million viewers who watched for the first live broadcast in 1954. The high from this year's broadcast was 7.9 million viewers who tuned in during the half-hour before Betty Cantrell, Miss Georgia, was crowned Miss America 2016 at Boardwalk Hall in September.
With competition from "Sunday Night Football," the pageant — which hosted a much-buzzed about appearance from Vanessa Williams, who was forced to give up her Miss America throne in 1984; the pageant CEO apologized to her during the event — managed to retain approximately 7 million viewers over the length of the broadcast, about the same number it drew for the 2015 pageant in 2014.
The pageant is back, but can it help the situation in Atlantic City?
But the pageant, which which recently celebrated its 95th anniversary (the pageant began in 1921 but organizers used the pageant year of 2016 to make the calculation), is increasingly looking to social media to bolster its relevance. Miss America trumpets its No. 1 spot for the week of Sept. 13 in the Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings.
http://www.nj.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2015/11/miss_america_pageant_announces_3-year_deal_with_ab.html
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