“I need women!”
NBC Sports’ Mike McCarley finished typing the pithy subject line and reviewed his e-mail one last time before hitting send.
The recipient was Bravo Media President Lauren Zalaznick, and McCarley needed help from the sister network. His boss, Dick Ebersol, had challenged all of the NBC Sports staff to deliver the biggest Super Bowl audience in history. To do that, they needed to appeal to the widest possible audience, which meant bringing more women into the game.
McCarley, NBC vice president of strategic marketing, wanted to create a series of programming tie-ins with NBC’s female-oriented properties, most notably, the wildly successful “Top Chef” series on Bravo.
Five minutes after sending, McCarley’s phone rang. It was Zalaznick.
“She was laughing,” said McCarley, “and told me that if my current job doesn’t work out, I could always write personal ads for a living.”
For McCarley and NBC Sports, the exchange was part of an artfully crafted strategy that helped deliver huge ratings for Super Bowl XLIII and culminated a dizzying six months that has seen the broadcast network set several viewership records.
While many have predicted the end of big-event sports programming on broadcast television, Ebersol and NBC have proved that broadcasters still can aggregate the biggest audiences.
Now, NBC is hoping to bottle its successful formula to ensure similarly high ratings for next year’s Winter Games in Vancouver.
“Events feel special when they are on NBC,” said NHL Commissioner and network partner Gary Bettman. “They tell a story without inserting themselves in the production of an event. Their storytelling is as good as it gets.”
People want broadcasters to just show
the event and show it well, Ebersol says.
The ratings numbers are only part of the story. NBC placed a huge bet on the Beijing Games, which were heavily hyped, but weren’t a guaranteed ratings home run. But at the end of the two weeks in August, NBC’s coverage had set viewership records, with 215 million unduplicated viewers over 17 days.
Now, five months later, 98.7 million viewers tuned in to the Super Bowl, which also set a record for the most-viewed Super Bowl ever.
From their offices at 30 Rock, NBC executives are quick to acknowledge that the quality of competition was the biggest factor for those record numbers. The Summer Games were paced by Michael Phelps’ record-setting performance early in week one, and the Super Bowl numbers were driven by the Pittsburgh Steelers’ last-minute victory.
But NBC executives also believe that they played a big role in the big numbers. They point to an extensive promotion and production strategy — done in conjunction with the NFL — that helped build viewership.
“The single most important thing you have to do with any major sports organization you’re going into business with is that you truly have to become their partners first,” said Ebersol, chairman of NBC Sports & Olympics. “You have to understand their needs and you have to overperform in the beginning with no expectation that you’re going to get anything yourself.”
NBC feels it accomplished that, particularly with the promotions that attracted female viewers to the Super Bowl. While women generally make up a large base of Olympics viewers, McCarley helped convince Ebersol to follow a similar Olympics strategy to the Super Bowl, which had a traditionally male-dominated audience.
In March 2007, Ebersol walked into McCarley’s office and laid down on a couch. Looking up at the ceiling, Ebersol said, “I want to make our Super Bowl the biggest Super Bowl that’s ever been.”
McCarley thought for a moment, and told Ebersol that NBC needed to use its Olympic plan for the Super Bowl.
The “Olympic plan” already was in place and focused on Beijing. It meant bringing all other aspects of NBC Universal into the Super Bowl promotion machine, which included NBC outlets such as the news-oriented MSNBC, the family-focused Universal Studios and the pop-centric “Access Hollywood.”
But it also included a specialized push with NBC’s female skewing properties like Bravo, Oxygen and its hugely popular “Today” show.
NBC executives believed that if the network could draw casual female viewers to the game, it would ensure a big ratings number.
Other networks have employed similar strategies, but not all have the deep resources of NBC.
After his “I need women!” e-mail, McCarley and Zalaznick huddled on plans to develop promotions around Bravo’s female-oriented properties, especially the popular “Top Chef.”
They created football-themed shows for the series that ran in the weeks before the Super Bowl, and they featured a cook-off during NBC’s Super Bowl pregame show and had chef Tom Colicchio on the set.
They utilized the “Today” show, moving it on-site to Tampa days before the game, while having Al Roker interviewing stars on a red carpet at the NFL Experience outside Raymond James Stadium on Sunday.
One couldn’t watch an NBC Universal property without knowing when to tune in to Super Bowl XLIII. Keith Olbermann dropped notices on “Countdown” and was part of the pregame show. Bob Costas was featured in an episode of USA’s “Monk” the week before the game. And Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore gave his forecasts from the stadium.
All of that translated into a record number of viewers for the game — and a record number of female viewers. An average of 38.3 million women tuned into this year’s game, marking the highest number of female viewers for a sports event since 38.6 million tuned into the 1994 Winter Olympics with Nancy Kerrigan.
It’s fair to say that if the Steelers had scored another touchdown when they had the ball late in the third quarter up 20-7, all the cross-promotion could have been for naught. But they didn’t, and NBC can point to its promotion plan when trumpeting the numbers.
“That’s something that we take a lot of pride in because that was us using our broad reach to reach — and promote — to a lot of different people in different ways,” McCarley said. “It ended up in record audiences. The game helps, yes, but you have to introduce those audiences in ways that are relevant to them.”
In addition to pushing for across-the-board promotion to expand its audience, Ebersol has also emphasized a simplistic, straightforward production strategy that the network believes has helped maintain that audience.
It’s rooted in a low-key on-air strategy used for both the Beijing Games and the Super Bowl.
Both productions were widely praised by both industry executives and media critics, who stress that NBC’s telecasts have a unique look and feel that’s different from all other sports broadcasts. The biggest criticism levied against NBC Sports seems to be the number of people in the pregame show.
“From pregame to postgame, NBC’s broadcast perfectly captured Super Bowl XLIII’s intensity and excitement,” said Howard Katz, the NFL’s senior vice president of broadcasting and media operations. “Al [Michaels] and John [Madden] have never been better and producer Fred Gaudelli and director Drew Esocoff captured every important moment along with every subtle nuance.”
For Ebersol and NBC, the big ratings and the critical acclaim provide a vindication for a style that eschews clutter and multiple graphics, minimizes crowd shots and offers understated on-air talent.
Call it old-school broadcasting.
“NBC uses its equipment very well,” said Neal Pilson, who ran CBS Sports during that the 1980s and early 1990s. “Some networks spend more time showing you how much equipment they have. You don’t need to see a replay from four different angles.”
That minimalist style that has defined how NBC approaches big events, from the Summer Olympics in Beijing to Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa, will be mirrored when NBC produces the Winter Games from Vancouver next year.
“We have a philosophy at NBC, which is the event is everything,” Ebersol said. “You do not need to trick it up. People will be much more comfortable if you just show the event and show it well.”
That attitude also extends to crowd shots during the game.
“I don’t like them,” Ebersol said. “This indiscriminate cutting from the event to the crowd brings nothing to the viewer’s pleasure. It may convince somebody in the truck that they’re justifying the cost of all their cameras, but I don’t want someone to think that way in our place.”
As NBC gets ready for another Olympic Games in Vancouver next year, executives expect to use the same promotional platform that it used for the Beijing Games and Super Bowl.
“Our promotion has to go to these casual fans and give them a reason to watch,” McCarley said. “That’s what’s going to grow the audience.”
And a growing audience is exactly what the U.S. Olympic Committee wants. USOC Chief Executive Jim Scherr sums it up simply: “They find the magic and then share it with viewers.”
