NBCUniversal Looks To Ride Olympic Wave to Gold

The Olympics are always a big deal, but NBCUniversal’s telecast of the Paris Summer Games is going to be très grand.

Big in terms of spectacle, starting with the opening ceremony on the River Seine on Friday. Big in terms of 5,000 hours shown on broadcast, cable and streaming. Big in terms of viewers.

That has NBCU going for the gold, having surpassed a record $1.2 billion months ago.

At a time when linear television ratings have shrunk, the Olympics are a prime example that sports can still draw big audiences.

NBCU is leaving nothing to chance. It is capping a long campaign headlined by non-Olympic stars like Paris Hllton, Snoop Dogg , Peyton Manning, Megan Thee Stallion, Lily Collins, Cardi B, SZA and Sabrina Carpenter with Olympics Week, where all of the company’s assets will promote the Paris Games.

The final push starts with daily events and integrations on Today and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon . On Wednesday, the U.S Army Band will salute Today hosts Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb as they leave New York to broadcast from Paris.

On Tuesday, America’s Got Talent will open with beach volleyball players Sara Hughes and Kelly Cheng passing the Olympic torch to AGT host Terry Crews and the show’s judges. Skier Lindsay Vonn will appear on the Password season finale on Wednesday and gymnast Laurie Hernandez will be among the guests on The Kelly Clarkson Show.

Access Hollywood will broadcast from Paris for five nights, offering an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at rehearsals for the opening ceremony.

French Food on the Plaza

For the final sprint to the finish, NBC will mount physical activations, bringing the Olympic experience to people in person, starting with turning New York’s Rockefeller Center into an Olympic plaza with athlete visits, French food and watch parties.

For advertisers, the Olympics offer an oasis during the summer, when high-rated sports programming dries up with the NFL and NBA on vacation.

In that environment, “the Olympics are the closest thing to a Super Bowl for 18 straight days,” Horizon Media senior VP, integrated investment, sports Adam Schwartz said.

Schwartz thinks ratings will be a lot better than they were for the COVID-19 delayed Tokyo Summer Olympics in 2021 , which averaged 15.6 million viewers per night.

Ratings for Paris might also top the 2016 Rio de Janiero Summer Olympics , which drew an average of 27 million primetime viewers and could compete with the 2012 London Games , which averaged 31.1 million viewers on NBC.

“During a very contentious time in a country that’s divided because of politics, if there’s one thing everyone can agree on, it’s rooting for Team USA,” Schwartz added.

The games should also give Peacock a boost, Schwartz said. During the last Olympics, some viewers complained that Peacock’s coverage was difficult to navigate. NBCU promises that has been fixed, he said.

Peacock’s Paris

Following the first streaming-only NFL playoff game earlier this year, viewers have learned how to subscribe to Peacock when there’s something on they need to watch, even if they dropped their subscription afterwards, he said. Peacock added 3 million subscribers, thanks to the playoff game.

“I’m sure signups will increase significantly over the course of the games,”  Schwartz said.

Natalie Bastian, global chief marketing officer at ad tech company Teads, is predicting unprecedented engagement during this year’s Olympics.

The Teads Media Barometer, which collects contextual signals, has registered a huge uptick in interest in the Olympics over the last eight to 10 months, Bastian said.

The Olympics is benefiting from broader consumer trends, including interest in women’s sports spurred by the Caitlin Clark effect . Even the controversy surrounding Clark being excluded from Team USA has enhanced the halo effect surrounding women's sports, she said.

Speaking of women, 8% of the chatter around the Olympics concerns the return of gold medal gymnast Simone Biles, boosted by a new Netflix documentary , Bastian said.

“The people who are interested in that are not just female,” she said. “It’s across the gamut, men and women, and across all age groups.”

With bold-faced names going for the gold, “whether they’re making a comeback like Simone or doing their closing lap like [men’s basketball star] LeBron [James], that's going to drive record viewership,” Bastian said.

That’s good news for NBCU and its parent company Comcast.

“We will deliver more revenue than we ever had,” said Dan Lovinger, president, Olympic and Paralympic sales at NBCU.

In April, NBCU said it had already booked an Olympics-record $1.2 billion in advertising sales and Lovinger declined to update that figure.

Explosive Digital Growth

“We’ll see explosive growth digitally and our linear revenue will likely grow as well,” Lovinger said.

Despite the heightened expectations, Lovinger said, NBC hasn’t raised its audience estimates for Paris. “We’ve been fairly bullish from the beginning,” he said.

NBCU sets aside a certain amount of inventory to ensure that if ratings are below expectations, advertisers will get make-good ads in the games. If ratings are higher than expected, NBCU would be able to sell those spots.

As demand has strengthened, NBCU has also added more programming hours and capacity on Peacock.

“We think this will allow us to continue selling through the games,” Lovinger said. “Once we see the ratings for the first couple of days, we’ll know for sure.”

With more programming on streaming and digital platforms, NBCU is doing business with smaller advertisers who can’t afford to pony up the tens of millions it would take to be an official sponsor and have commercials in NBC primetime or when all eyes are on Simone Biles or LeBron James as they go for the gold.

Buyers said commercials in high-profile primetime events cost anywhere from $750,000 to $1.25 million, depending on the advertiser and their package. But for this Olympics, smaller advertisers can get into the games for a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

Lovinger said that NBCU will have at least twice as many advertisers participating in the Paris games compared to Tokyo.

With much of the programming streaming, “Peacock gives us a lot of new tools from an ad-tech perspective,” he said, including audience targeting.

A wider array of advertisers than in the past will be able to buy Olympic inventory because for the first time, NBCU is making Olympic commercials available via programmatic technology, working with The Trade Desk.

Lovinger said NBCU tested programmatic selling of biddable inventory within sports programming during the Olympic Trials.

Winning Bids

NBC established a minimum price for available inventory on Peacock and allowed advertisers to make bids. “We actually saw double-digit growth over our floor for the inventory that we put in play,” Lovinger said.

Lovinger said that the systems established by the Trade Desk and NBCU enabled the companies to ensure programmatic buys didn’t violate promises of category exclusivity made to other advertisers via an artificial intelligence video-scanning system to alert human sales staffers of possible conflicts.

NBCU is selling ads in social content that will appear on a wider-than-ever array of platforms. To feed social media content, NBC is bringing influencers to Paris and giving them behind-the-scenes access they wouldn’t have been able to get on their own, according to Lovinger. Some of them will report on food, fashion and other Paris attractions that would be of interest, particularly to younger people.

There will also be snackable highlight packages on social media that NBCU will be able to monetize through deals with those platforms.

In addition to generating revenue, the social activity is designed to drive people to the main course of Olympic programming on NBC and Peacock, Lovinger said.

Big advertisers who have become official Olympic Ring sponsors have worked with NBCU to pull out the stops during the game.

Flying With ‘Top Chef’

Last year, Delta sponsored an episode of Top Chef on NBCU’s Bravo that features Olympic and Paralympic athletes cooking under the Eiffel Tower. More recently, the airline’s CEO Ed Bastian was on the Today s how, giving away a trip to Paris. During the games, Delta will sponsor the Gold Zone, a new channel on Peacock that will whip around to the day’s most exciting events.

(Paris is a prime destination for Delta, but the Olympics are depressing travel to the city, resulting in a $100 million drop in revenue for the airline, Bastian said this month on CNBC.)

Also Read: Google Signs Up With NBCU as Search Sponsor for U.S. Olympic Team

Schwartz said that research backs up the value of advertising during the Olympics. “Viewers are very engaged and tend to be very loyal to some of the brands that pop up there,” he said. “During the summer, you just don’t get the mass reach you can get with the Olympics anywhere else.”

Advertisers are benefitting from NBCU’s promotional efforts.

Jenny Storms, chief marketing officer, entertainment and sports for NBCUniversal, said her group tore up its playbook when approaching how to promote the Olympics.

“It comes around once every four years, and the world changes in four years,“ Storms said. “So we have to treat it like it’s new every single time.”

Research conducted by NBCU found that 30% of people said celebrities sparked conversations. That led to the celebrity-focused Olympics coverage.

The promotion was a concerted effort across the whole company, Storms said. If Peyton Manning was featured in a promotion, the Hall of Fame quarterback wound up being part of the opening ceremonies. Similarly, Snoop Dogg will be featured in primetime.

Until recently, none of the promotions involved paid media. But in the last few weeks, a robust round of paid media was added, focusing on older women and younger men. The result was big record ratings for the Olympic trials.

Word’s Been Spread

“I doubt there anyone out there that doesn’t know the Olympics are coming,” Storms said. “Our efforts have been surgical about hitting everyone.”

As a professional, Storm said she’s not a fan of family research — hearing how friends and relatives react to her work.

But she couldn’t help being cheered by the reaction to a promo that dropped this month featuring Sabrina Carpenter and her song “Espresso.” In the promo, Carpenter is in a Paris cafe, telling a bluebird how excited she is about the Olympics. Turns out, the bird is in her imagination and the waiters in the cafe decide she’s had too much espresso.

Rick Cordella, NBC Sports president, and Molly Solomon, executive producer and president, NBC Olympics production, both rave about how much their daughters loved the Carpenter content. Other colleagues related how their kids were doing Olympic activities in summer camp.

Olympic athletes are reacting to the promotion as well.

Last year, NBC aired promos featuring Megan Thee Stallion talking about the “Ahh-lympics.”

During the recent Olympic trails, Jordan Chiles talked about how excited she was to earn a spot on the U.S. gymnastics team, adding: “This was for you uncle and Megan. I’m going to the Ahh-Lympiics.”

Megan Thee Stallion responded by sending flowers to Chiles.

“We had no idea she was going to do that,” Storm said. “But what it says to us is wow our promotion really resonated with a young Olympian, who brought it to life and finished the story.”