 This is not just another story about how NBC’s Olympics coverage has been flawed and rejected. Instead, let's take a step back -- let's question all of the assumptions on the table, and imagine what it would mean for future NBC coverage to be really successful. On the morning after, everything's fair game: time zones, media channels, and even the godlike inscrutability of Nielsen itself.
For two weeks, it seemed that every morning brought with it another story about how NBC’s Nielsen ratings had been beaten by American Idol – or, worse, reruns of CSI. The news today is that NBC will likely lose the entire February sweeps period to both ABC (on the strength of the Super Bowl and strong new episodes of Lost, Gray’s Anatomy, etc.) and Fox (on the strength of American Idol and 24).
And yet, NBC is upbeat. Or at least they are pretending to be. The same network that justified its prime-time-centric strategy by noting that advertising revenue was still a function of prime-time viewership now back away from those metrics, prominently spinning the heightened traffic at NBCOlympics (up significantly from the Athens games). NBC has announced $900 million in total Olympic-related revenue, which would give it $50 to $75 million in Turin-related profit.
That’s not chump change. But it’s still a relatively marginal return on such massive investments. NBC has purchased the rights to the next three Olympics (Beijing 2008, Vancouver 2010, London 2012) to a tune of $2.89 billion, and don’t expect NBC to sit comfortably with its current strategy in the wake of the negative publicity and diminishing returns that have come with its historical broadast strategy.
An article in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal quotes Randy Falco, president and COO for the NBC Universal Television Group. Falco notes that 2006 may eventually be the turning-point between traditional prime-time Olympics coverage and a variety of coverage packages designed to meet different needs across different (read: mobile and broadband) platforms. In 1996 in Atlanta, “about 75% of the value of those Games was in the prime-time broadcast … at these games, about 45% of the value is in prime time.”
Clearly, that number will continue to drop, and it’s no surprise: nobody wants to watch sports in tape-delay, especially when it’s becoming increasingly impossible or undesirable to keep yourself “in the dark” as to the evening’s outcome.
But these Olympics may also emerge as an touchstone event for how we think about Nielsen ratings and the quantification of media attention. Opening ceremonies kicked off just days after the announcement that Nielsen would be expanding into “out-of-home” viewers – that’s a phrase that translates to “college students” for the rest of us. Putting college students in the mix will only drastically improve the ratings share already assigned to network sports programming (picture a frat house and an empty kegerator and you’ll follow me just fine).
Additionally, as the distinction between network and cable programming continues to blur, we may find Nielsen an increasingly inadequate measure of real market share and potential advertising revenue. CBS declined to air new episodes against the Olympics because its prime-time audience skews a bit older and more female than ABC’s; CBS determined (probably wisely) that its audience was more likely to be drawn in to NBC’s Olympics coverage. But in the end, by Nielsen standards, everybody did well – probably because more Americans were tuned in across the board, and probably because of a widespread ratings drop in pay-cable during that same period.
Do the numbers exist to prove this hypothesis? Yes. Are they publicized or incorporated into the discourse around Olympics coverage? Not really. You want to know whether Olympics drew attention away from college hoops on ESPN or the NBA All-Star game on TNT, and you want to know whether NBCOlympics.com drew attention away from Bristol’s omnipresent web portal. You want to know how many people actually watched Olympics highlights on their cell phones. These are the numbers of the future, and if Nielsen continues to move at a glacial pace, we’re simply going to be stuck with the wrong tools to have the conversation we need to have. |
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