NBC's Olympic Fool's Gold; Google Comes Home Empty-Handed
BRAND EQUITY By Erik Qualman, Search Engine Watch, Aug 21, 2008
Columns | Contact Erik | Biography
These are the most watched games in Olympic history. The opening ceremony was the biggest television event since the Super Bowl reaching 34.2 million American viewers, according to Nielsen Ratings. Michael Phelps' historic swimming captured the nation. The recognition and use of online tools and video by NBC is commendable.
So, does NBC deserve a gold medal? On the surface and by old measures, they would reach the apex of the podium, but that would be fool's gold. Here's why:
1. There's This Thing Called the Internet
For one of Phelps' gold medals, NBC showed the action live in every time zone except on the West Coast, which was delayed three hours. Is Dick Ebersol not aware of a thing called the Internet? NBC failed to do what others learned long ago: beg, borrow, and make better is the way of the Web.
Too many companies -- in this instance, NBC -- believe their problems are unique when it comes to the Web. Often, however, other companies have already wrestled with similar issues.
Back in June, ABC made the right decision by streaming the Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate 18-hole playoff to decide the U.S. Open Championship live on the Web, in addition to their television coverage. Company Web servers cringed and America's productivity declined in March Madness-like fashion on Monday, June 16, but ABC and the PGA captivated millions of viewers on the Web.
Why wouldn't NBC have done the same in this instance? Most likely because...
2. Old Metrics are Deceiving
They're fooling themselves with old metrics. Sure, NBC is happy to show less popular events online, but not precious events like swimming and gymnastics.
Why? Because NBC and their advertisers (Adidas, Samsung, Volkswagen, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, etc.), are judging themselves by old metrics. And that is fool's gold. They're judging success on archaic Nielsen Ratings. They would be better served opening up their online viewership because:
- It's more measurable.
- It has a younger audience.
- Users can't "TiVo" through commercials.
- Users are willing to give you valuable demographic information like name, age, gender, etc. in return for video.
- It increases -- not decreases -- your total viewership, which means more eyeballs on those advertisements.
3. Don't Lie to Your Audience
NBC treated viewers with little regard, indicating that Dara Torres would be up in 14 minutes...35 minutes later she finally swam her race. Worse, one night they indicated Phelps would be on in 32 minutes, and then when the time came, it was four minutes about his eating habits -- he wasn't even swimming! Not to mention the whole CGI opening ceremony debacle.
4. Dead Air = Missed Opportunity
They got it right showing basketball in the early morning hours (8 and 10 EST) online; however, they missed two golden opportunities.
First, there was no option to hear announcers. For events like cycling this is somewhat difficult to follow.
Second, and much worse for their advertisers, there weren't any advertisements during downtime. So, during basketball timeouts there was just a wide shot of the court for awkward three-minute intervals. Why wouldn't you use this opportunity to give your advertisers more love or even add additional advertisers? This technology has been around for almost a decade (remember how Mark Cuban became a billionaire?).
5. Google Failed
It's potentially understandable that an older-school company like NBC may get some things wrong, but Google didn't exactly turn in a world record performance either.
Along with Phelps, Ryan Lotche was one of the U.S. swimming heartthrobs. Lotche's last name was prominently displayed on his swimming cap, hence most searches would not include his first name. A search for "Lotche" has a number-one listing for askville and a number two listing for one Lotche Ramaj's Facebook profile; sorry ladies.
These poor search results were consistent for many of the athletes, so much so that Yahoo and MSN attempted to manipulate the results by hand, as Nathania Johnson covered in great detail for the Search Engine Watch blog.
Also, the last-minute nature of the YouTube/NBC deal is laughable. It's not like YouTube is new. Also, since Google owns YouTube, they should've placed a sponsored listing explaining how the deal didn't cover the U.S. So a search here for "Olympics on YouTube" yielded frustrating results.
That being said, NBC did many things better this time around (for instance, the Microsoft Silverlight picture quality online is amazing); they just don't deserve a gold medal. NBC failed to leverage best practices in regards to combining offline and online content. A bronze, or perhaps even a silver medal, is in order.
However, the scary thing is that Google probably doesn't medal at all. Is Google now just like any other big and methodic company? Not quite, but they probably should evaluate their performance here and make some changes for the next big media event, otherwise they may have to pass the torch to the "next Google" sooner than they expect.
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Biography
Erik Qualman is the Global Vice President of Online Marketing for EF Education, headquartered in Lucerne, Switzerland. EF Education is the world's largest private educator (Student Tours, Language Schools, Smithsonian, Hult MBA School, Au Pair Exchange, Student Exchange, etc.). Qualman works out of the 850 person Cambridge, Massachusetts office.
Prior to joining EF Education, Qualman helped grow the marketing and eBusiness functions of Cadillac & Pontiac (1994-97), BellSouth (1998-2000), Yahoo (2000-03), EarthLink (2003-05) and Travelzoo (2005-08). Qualman holds a BA from Michigan State University and an MBA from The University of Texas at Austin.
Qualman is a frequently requested speaker within the Internet and marketing community. He's also an acclaimed fiction author -- more information is available at American Novel. A former basketball player at Michigan State University, Qualman still finds time to follow his beloved Spartans.
Article Archives by Erik Qualman:
» NBC's Olympic Fool's Gold; Google Comes Home Empty-Handed - August 21, 2008
» Avoiding Online Missteps with Generation Y and Millenniums - August 7, 2008
» The Top 4 Best Facebook Practices - July 24, 2008
» Has Facebook Found the Key to Making Money via Search? - July 10, 2008
» Can Google Predict the Next President? - June 26, 2008
» Live Search Cashback vs. Google: A Case Study - June 12, 2008
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