NBC's Greatest Sin: Not Leveraging the Olympics to Win Elections

by: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan August 28, 2008 | about stocks: GE / MSFT    
Ashkan Karbasfrooshan

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan

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I’m still not convinced that NBC (GE) can or should be blamed for not maximizing the Web opportunity with its Olympics coverage.  The simple fact is TV loses when Web grows. I’m not saying Web viewership cannibalizes TV audiences, I’m just saying the sooner the Web becomes less of a clown industry, the worse that is for TV.   Don’t be a buffoon in denying that; once readers and marketers realized audiences get their news online, print only died faster.

Anyway, where I do fault NBC is not using the Olympics to get any momentum.  During the closing ceremonies, NBC began to heavily promote the political conventions. Here’s what I did not understand:

  • NBC and in turn MSNBC and MSNBC.com (which are 50-50% and 83-17% between NBC and Microsoft (MSFT) respectively) will be duking it out with CNN, FOX News, ABC, CBS for ratings (online and offline) during the elections, which, unlike the Olympics, it does not have exclusive rights to.
  • MSNBC.com bought Newsvine, one of the more political oriented social bookmarking sites last year.
  • Social media sites Digg and YouTube partner have a strangle hold on efforts to tie in “the people” with mass media. NBC could have and should have leveraged Newsvine to get people to vote and interact with the Olympics (vote for the day’s performance, shocker, etc.) and then transitioned this interaction from the Olympics to the elections.

Now, without having leveraged the Olympics (which it had exclusive rights to) it will have to catch up quite a bit to be relevant with the elections since its resources have been so focused on the Olympics.

All to say, I still don’t fully fault NBC’s cold shoulder to the Web; as I said, it went out of its way to sit on any spark the Olympics could have generated online… but not leveraging the Olympics for the Elections will come back to haunt the peacock network.

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