Advertising Effect of 2008 Olympic Games

The 2008 Olympic Games in Bejing are a tour de force for marketers. Some of the TV coverage is at odd hours in the U.S., but the narratives such as Michael Phelps' quest for gold-medal immortality, or the U.S. NBA players trying to avoid another international humiliation, resonate for many viewers.
By any measure, NBC's Olympics coverage (BusinessWeek.com, 8/7/08) has been a success. Through five days, NBC Universal says it has attracted 168 million total viewers for the Olympics, nearly 15 million more than for the first five days of the Summer Games in Athens four years ago. The average prime-time Olympic viewing audience has been 31.3 million viewers through Tuesday, Aug. 12, according to Nielsen Media Research. That's the best since the 1992 Barcelona Games.
The top price paid for a 30-second spot, during the swimming competition, is $750,000. Viewership and interest has been a bit better than marketers anticipated, enabling NBC to sell an additional $10 million in ads since the start of the Games. NBC had secured more than $1 billion in ad revenues before the Games began.
There has been a mix of more than 100 new and old advertisers, with Adidas (ADSG), Nike (NKE), and Visa (V) among the heavy hitters. The overall list also includes both Presidential candidates, who together spent more than $10 million on Olympic ads.
Winning Young Men
More 18-to-34-year-old men are watching, which is a coup for NBC, since they are tough to attract to prime-time TV. Ratings among that group are up 28% compared with Athens. Among men aged 18 to 49, ratings are up 22%.
Four years ago, the theme that surrounded the Olympics was whether Athens should have hosted the games at all given how pressed the city seemed to be to finish stadiums and arenas. This year, there has been a narrative around whether China, with a much criticized human rights record (BusinessWeek.com, 2/20/08) and air quality problems, should have won the privilege of the Games.
But there is mystique around China. It is an emerging world power that is on track to pass the U.S. as the world's biggest economic engine. With so many story lines, and the Olympics conjuring an abundance of national pride (BusinessWeek.com, 5/28/08), advertisers are hard-pressed to come up with messages that can rival the events themselves for consumer attention.
We've been watching the ads and in the accompanying slide show we rate them, just as we did the ads for the Super Bowl. Some of them were found worthy of a gold medal; others, we felt, should never have left the starting blocks.

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