Olympics thoughts no one asked for

The NBC primetime Olympics broadcast should be one of the premier placements in advertising.

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Today, it’s not.

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NBC is clearly making money on it (that good Google money too.) But as a viewer you can feel NBC generating revenue from your eyeballs. I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s a shame because their technical innovation, production quality and talent are the best in sports. I mean that as a compliment.

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Right now, the primetime broadcast is like a city bus. A nice and clean city bus, like one you might expect to find in Norway. It’s fine. Maybe a little better than fine. Maybe it has free Wi-Fi provided by the Scandinavian countries obscene tax rates. It’ll get your where you’re going but you’re not exactly going to seek it out. (This is a strained metaphor, but the Norway joke made me smile.)

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The broadcast is the essentially the same as it was 20 years ago when Bob Costas hosted – some chatting, some event coverage, some ads, some human-interest stories, some more ads, some Americans winning medals. It’s a war horse that delivers. In the short term, it will look good on the NBC Comcast Universal Sheinhardt Wig Company’s balance sheet, but it’s not doing much for the long-term health of the partnership. It’s not trying to bring new people in.

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Obviously, more and more of the viewership is going into streaming (Peacock! It’s actually pretty good, who knew) and people are watching clips in a million different places, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for a primetime spectacle.

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The ads are the issue, per usual, we ruin everything. It’s not the creative (speaking of flop sweating revenue propositions, consumer AI, you need it! Although you probably don’t). It’s the sheer volume of interruptions. Despite the amazing drama of the games and Mike Tirico’s equally amazing ability to sell it, the Primetime experience is often disjointed, incoherent and frustrating.

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But I didn’t come here to bury the broadcast or its potential to generate massive revenue for NBC.

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I’m here with some free, completely unsolicited ideas!

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Turn the primetime broadcast into a luxury item for marketers and must see tv for viewers.

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?Limit the advertisers for the primetime broadcast to 3 for the entirety of the games. How valuable would it be to certain global brands to have complete domination of that space for the entirety of the games? Or more accurately how much would they pay to keep their competitors from having it. On top of that give those premium partners more exclusive rights to active leading up the Games. The price tag would initially look outrageous on, but when amortized (there’s a decent chance I’m using that word wrong) over four years it would probably seem much more tolerable.

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Create ad breaks that benefit both the brands and viewers. More engaging content creates more engaged viewers. Imagine one break an hour where a minute or two branded film played, would everyone still immediately reach for their phone? How much more effective would it be for a brand to surprise viewers instead of beating them to death with Summer Sanders and Torri Huske jumping into a pool?

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Give the broadcast some flow. The producers of the primetime show clearly have a ton of creative ideas on how to mix it up, but there’s no time to actually do anything so you end up with SNL celebrities sitting on a couch talking about why they like the Olympics, instead of doing something.

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For the most part NBC killed it with these Games. But they’re underutilizing a key asset (according to me, someone whose never produced a TV program.) Would it be risky to retool a known entity before the 2028 LA Games? Absolutely, but they’ll never have a better chance to turn its primetime airtime into one of the most coveted placements in media.

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?Other random thoughts…If Women’s 7s Rugby doesn’t replace baseball as our national pastime I’m moving to Canada…My wife pointed this out, but we weren’t aware that you also had to be a supermodel to run track for team USA, jeez, leave something for the rest of us...The Snoop Dogg reinvention is mind-blowing. To go from making Doggystyle – which if you haven’t relistened to lately, one might be inclined to say there are problematic elements – to carrying the torch for team USA. We can disassociate the celebrity from the art. Brands worry a lot about “brand safe” personalities, but people don’t care.