With less than two months before the Winter Olympics open in Turin, Italy, NBC has sold 90 percent of its advertising time, meaning these Games will be the network’s biggest revenue producer ever.
NBC’s goal for the Games is to sell $900 million in advertising on its broadcast and cable outlets, and as of last week, it had already sold more time than in any prior Winter Games, including the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City, which yielded $740 million in total ad revenue.
While NBC has not announced specifics, there will be substantially more programming hours behind the Turin Olympics on NBC and its USA Network, MSNBC and CNBC. Nonetheless, the fact that these Games are in a time zone six hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time is a programming challenge.
“With the model we had in Athens, where we were on 24 hours a day [combined cable and network] for 1,200 hours, I think what we proved is that production and story lines are more important than the time of day you put it on,” said Peter Lazarus, senior vice president of NBC Universal Sports & Olympic Sales and Marketing.
Among the top ad buyers along NBC’s networks are those with Olympic rights, including USOC partners Anheuser-Busch, AT&T, DHL, General Motors and Johnson & Johnson, and IOC TOP partners Coke, Samsung, Visa and Lenovo.
Larger advertisers without Olympic rights include Applebee’s, ExxonMobil and Target.
The strong sales also counter the assertion that many marketers were hoarding their Olympic budgets for the Beijing Games in 2008. But those sales are healthy as well: “We’re 45 percent sold with only 10 advertisers in,” Lazarus said.
