Posted on 06/04/2008 7:10:56 AM PDT by abb
With just two months until the Beijing Olympics, NBC is scrambling to sell out ad time for its broadcast of the Games.
The Peacock network is said to be aggressively pushing advertisers and their agencies to buy spots during the Olympics as part of the "upfront" sales negotiations that started in mid-May.
Ad execs estimated NBC was anywhere from $150 million to $300 million shy of its sales target.
Officially, though, an NBC spokesman said sales were on track. "We're about 80 percent sold and on pace with past games," said NBC's Brian Walker.
In April, NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker said the network had sold about 75 percent of the available Olympic ad time and that demand was "incredibly strong."
General Electric-owned NBC is also pushing promotional tie-ins and other ad deals to unload as much time as possible before the opening ceremonies in August, ad execs said.
"Whenever you negotiate with the networks you try to figure out what the hot-button issues are and the Olympics are definitely a hot-button issue for them," said one ad buyer, who asked to be unnamed, citing the sensitive talks.
The network aims to pull in $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion in Olympic ad sales, topping the $1 billion goal it set for the 2004 Summer Games in Athens.
NBC needs to bring in about $1 billion in ad sales to break even on the games. The network paid about $900 million for the US rights to broadcast the Olympics and will spend another $100 million on coverage.
Most of the big spenders have already bought during the Games, which means
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(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
"Network evening newscasts will go dark after the '08 elections and their news divisions disbanded."
ping
I hoping this places a serious crimp in NBC’s plan to show 80% commercials/ 20% sports during the Olympics.
I gave up when a friend was in the Seoul Olympics and they showed 20 minutes of ‘Up Close and Personal’ ran 45 seconds of competition. I did not want to see Bob Costas, I wanted to seethe event the friend had trained for most of his life.
Methinks Olympic broadcasts this time will have smaller audiences. Who wants to watch evening TV of events that happened 12+ hours earlier and will be available on demand from various web sources earlier in the day?
I’m sure that adding Keith Overbite as the head of NBC News will help NBC across the board in selling their available ad time.
I was in Europe for the better part of eight years and from that time I came to the conclusion that, save for a few shows here and there, TV over there is so much better than TV here. It’s not even close. Their coverage of sporting events focuses on the sport, not on the self important clowns whose only job is to talk about the sport. Their news programs- although much more biased to the left than ours - are about actual news around the world, not a few minutes of politcal issues followed by 45 minutes of ‘human interest’ fluff and trivial tabloid segments.
Oh how pathetic NBC’s Olympic coverage has been.
Those of us old enough to recall ABC’s peerless coverage wince every time we see milk-and-cookie boys Bob Costas and Dan Hicks spew their jingoistic drivel.
If NBC were in charge in the 70s we’d never have learned about Olga Korbut or Franz Klammer - NBC would have been too busy touting the American also-rans.
NBC is hedging its bets this year by hyping 8 different Olympians in the hope that at least one of them will come good in Beijing. No more embarrassing busts like Bode Miller!
In 2000 I was in London and watched the Sydney Olympics on the BBC. The quality and depth of the coverage was staggering - races were replayed several times and with isolation shots of each competitor. Compare that with NBC’s “coming up next” and “in 20 minutes - more gymnastics!”
LOL - we think alike - see my post below yours!
I’m sure that adding Keith Overbite as the head of NBC News will help NBC across the board in selling their available ad time.
My thoughts exactly. I would gladly ad time from a lying, liberal leftest blogger err, newscaster.
I wonder whether any sensible advertiser would want his product associated with the Chinese Communist Party and the genocide of Tibetans, not to mention poisoned food and environmental pollution on an unprecedented scale.
Yes and it will iclude taped delay clips of olympic atheletes getting their bodies oxidized by spending two weeks in Beijings’ toxic environment/pollution. Not a sight I care to watch and one that was completely avoidable.
Yeah. One wonders if Frito-Lay, McDonalds, Kellog, Nestle, etc. really want their food products viewed in the context of lead contamination.
Would you prefer they spew unjingoistic drivel? ;) (Or is that reserved for Olbermann?)
I plan on not watching one minute of the Olympics for these reasons:
1: NBCs horrible coverage. I am sick of the sob stories about the athletes.
2: The whole Olympic movement needs to be humbled. They require sites to spend billions of dollars for basically a two week party.
3: Not supporting what is a rerun of the 1936 Berlin Nazi games.
Methinks Olympic broadcasts this time will have smaller audiences.
&&&
I stopped watching when they started all that coverage of the personal stories of various athletes. I guess they were trying to increase the female audience. Well, I am a female — and not exactly a sports fan — but I used to really enjoy watching the events and cheering for the USA.
Also, they seem determined to root for everyone but the USA.
They ruined it for me and, I suspect, for many.
The aspect of having advance knowledge of the outcome of a particular event would not influence my watching, as I really do not follow sports news, so I would probably miss that info.
I quit watching last time, because I never saw an event.
Moody’s Issues (Another) Negative Outlook for Newspapers
By Jennifer Saba
Published: June 04, 2008 1:15 PM ET
NEW YORK Moody’s Investors Service is the latest research firm to slap the newspaper industry with a negative outlook over the next 12 to 18 months due to downturn in revenue and circulation as advertisers and readers turn to the Internet.
Its also threw down the possibility that industry fundamentals are weak enough that it will drag down even the best-positioned companies.
“Liquidity and covenant compliance could be a primary issue leading to negative rating pressure for almost all industry participants even if an issuer’s leverage is within the expected band for its rating,” wrote Moody’s vice president and senior analyst John Puchalla, VP, senior analyst John Page, and their team, in a report released this week.
The outlook report explains the newspaper industry is facing two challenges at once, a cyclical downturn and the migration of readers and advertisers to the Internet. What’s troubling is that even if an economic re-bound occurs, it will be much less “robust” compared to other corrections.
Moody’s cites Universal McCann data that shows that the newspaper industry’s share of U.S. advertising dropped to 15% from 22% over the past 10 years as a result of fractured media landscape and advances in technology that make news more immediate (and therefore print becomes less relevant).
Moody’s analysts anticipate that newspaper advertising revenue will decline in the range of 7% to 9% in 2008 and moderate to low single-digit declines in 2009 — if the economy recovers next year.
Puchalla and Page wrote the reasons behind the high level of newspaper downgrades are three-fold: the loss of newspaper advertising share in relation to total U.S. advertising, the willingness of newspaper publishers to operate at higher leverage levels, and liquidity.
In the past 10 years EBITDA as a percentage of revenue fell 19% from 28%, Moody’s reports. The erosion in margins means that publishers will have to aggressively manage fix-costs— a Catch-22 if ever there was one. Moody’s analysts acknowledge that, “editorial and sales are critical regardless of the business mode. It will prove challenging to continually reduce editorial costs without impairing the core news product or employee morale.”
The spending the industry has reduced — Moody’s estimates $980 million in 2007 — has not kept pace with revenue declines. The cuts only offset about 61% of the drop in revenue. “The result is a 10% decline in EBITDA” in 2007 “with performance weakening to a 12.7% drop in EBITDA for Q1 of 2008.”
Paper prices are expected to rise as producers cut capacity in efforts to stabilize newsprint prices, making the reductions even more difficult. “More aggressive non-newsprint cost actions might be necessary to mitigate the effects of revenue declines,” Puchalla and Page wrote.
But it’s not all darkness in the land of newspapers. Moody’s analysts think the medium has a number of distinct advantages including an “unmatched infrastructure at local, national, and international levels to provide news and information to a large audience.” Newspaper readers have enviable demographics highly desired by advertisers.
“We believe that newspaper companies, which have been slow to exploit the value of their content across the range of news and information channels, will use their strong branding not only to provide internally generated content but also become a trusted aggregator of user-generated content,” analysts wrote.
Jennifer Saba (jsaba@editorandpublisher.com) is E&P’s associate editor.
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Not if they continue to choose the GOP nominee.
Network evening newscasts will go dark after the '08 elections and their news divisions disbanded
Call me a glass half empty kind of guy, but that all depends on if B. Hussein loses or not...
My last post notwithstanding, The Plumage network will be lucky to not lose it's shirt completely with this Olympics. With their contract to have both winter and summer games through 2016, methinks NBC bit off more than they could chew.
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