EXCLUSIVE: NBCUniversal, amazingly, is now in its fifth decade of carrying the Olympic Games. With this month’s Beijing Winter Olympics, though, all of that accumulated institutional knowledge is colliding with a media landscape in massive flux.
The company is taking some bold strategic swings with Beijing, even compared with last summer’s Tokyo Olympics. One example is the decision to stream all events on Peacock, NBCU’s ad-supported streaming service. But the move with perhaps even greater implications for stakeholders in the $70 billion TV advertising business has been a “test-and-learn” effort with ad tracking firm iSpot.
The program is part of NBCU’s wide-scale effort to seek alternatives to Nielsen. ISpot, a nearly 10-year-old startup build on data harvested from 39 million smart-TVs, is among the largest of the dozens of vendors NBCU has invited into its tent. Nielsen has faced intense criticism from a range of media companies, agencies and trade groups over the past year. They have charged the 99-year-old firm with undercounting linear, streaming and out-of-home viewing, and say its machinery is outmoded and broken. While complaints about Nielsen are nothing new, the more precarious position all traditional players find themselves in due to streaming gives the discussion an added charge.
Nielsen has conceded to some minor errors, but says it is still deserving of its status as the industry’s dominant provider of ratings and measurement. Later this year, it plans to roll out Nielsen One, which it bills as a more comprehensive solution encompassing streaming and linear.
In an interview with Deadline, Kelly Abcarian, EVP of Measurement & Impact for NBCU, and iSpot CEO Sean Muller described the progress they are seeing in the test. Between Super Bowl LVI and Olympics coverage last Sunday, NBCU accounted for 69% of all TV ad impressions on that one day. In primetime thus far (through last Saturday), the Olympics has had a 20% lower ad load than the norm across linear TV, but it has delivered 170% more ad impressions per unit than ABC, CBS and Fox combined.
NBCU has been driving toward ad load reductions in recent years. But the load has gotten lighter since the Tokyo Olympics. According to iSpot, Tokyo coverage had 17% lower ad loads than rival network programming, but Beijing is so far tracking at 23% lower. The game plan, as is the case industrywide and among newer streaming upstarts, is to reduce the overall volume of spots but increase their relevance and effectiveness and, therefore, be able to increase rates. NBCU parent Comcast last fall reported nearly $1.8 billion in ad revenue from Tokyo. The company generally does not break out profitability, but execs said last year they expected to make money on Tokyo despite myriad issues with Covid.
For Abcarian, the mission with iSpot carries extra significance. Before joining NBCU in April 2021, she had a 16-year run as an exec at Nielsen.
“This is the first time Olympics advertisers are actually seeing their ad delivery in this way,” she said. “Nielsen’s measurement doesn’t allow you to ever get to the actual, precise ad unit. It absolutely does not allow you to unify that with cross-stream delivery. … On linear and streaming, they’re able to see the overlap and understand what that kind of effect is of reaching consumers across all screens.” They also can see “how many streaming households are also watching on linear as well, as well as who’s only watching on streaming and how are we reaching those cord-cutting homes.”
Viewership numbers for Peacock have generally been kept in a vault, as is the case for streaming data in general. But its contribution to overall Super Bowl viewing is expected to be several millions of viewers, though an official number has not yet been released.
Instead of dwelling on viewership, which is the old paradigm, the objective of NBCU and iSpot is to assess the effectiveness of ads. “Nielsen’s measurement was based on a concept that the ads traveled with the content,” Abcarian said. “Now, they don’t have to. At the end of the day, advertisers care about the performance of their creative inside of a premium tentpole event of their Olympics.”
Muller said the aim is to create a new paradigm. It is undeniable that the aggregate audience numbers on live, linear TV are not what they used to be. But that hardly means that the 30-plus brands taking part in the NBCU/iSpot test don’t believe they can get a better return on their investment.
“Everyone is so used to comparing the ratings to previous Olympics. We’re really creating new benchmarks here,” he said. “We’re really transitioning the industry to think about the metrics that matter for the consumer and advertisers. We’re less focused on history. We’re more in the moment of the value that we’re bringing to advertisers.”
NBCU and iSpot have sought to identify “Olympic moments” for advertisers. The biggest occurred Sunday, thanks to the Super Bowl lead-in. When Kaillie Humphries won gold for the U.S. in the women’s monobob, 27.5 million viewers tuned in, the companies said. The ad insights are being delivered with faster turnaround, a 48-hour lag, than the minimum of 14 days commonly offered in the marketplace, Abcarian said.
Because iSpot is able to track ads second-by-second, NBCU is able to offer brands particularly valuable placement when those special moments arise.
“Advertisers know that every second matters,” Abcarian said. When Chloe Kim won the gold medal for the U.S. in the women’s snowboard halfpipe last Thursday night at 9:49 p.m. ET, the exact size of the audience could be identified via iSpot. “You can’t get that with Nielsen measurement,” she said. Sensing the opportunity, Toyota “attached quickly after Chloe Kim won that gold” and had its brand messaging appearing as a logical follow-up to the event itself. The dynamic nature of that placement suggests the potential for a real-time, biddable marketplace for live sports, in which ad messages are tailored to specific moments.
Those kinds of advances are unlikely as long as Nielsen’s dominance continues, Muller said. “A monopoly is never good,” he said. “Everyone knows that. It stifles innovation, it doesn’t really move industries and people forward. I think we’re at a juncture here where change is upon us, no matter what. We’re moving into a new consumer world in television and so it has to be cross-screen. The ads no longer travel with the programs, so you have to rethink the measurement. So you can’t just measure programs and then derive the ads. The whole legacy approach is simply not sustainable anymore.”
Delivering a rating is no longer enough, he added. “It’s also the consumer and advertiser experience,” he said. “That must come front and center in this new paradigm.”
Echoed Abcarian, “What does a rating really translate to for an advertiser? It doesn’t actually tell them much about the impact that it has on their brand, the impact they’re having with consumers, the impact of the value of the investment in the programming or the content or the platforms they’re choosing to reach consumers.”
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