NBC has super plan to promote Olympics
Network invests in Super Bowl advertisements
NBC isn’t just airing Super Bowl ads. It’s producing them.
The network has five advertisements that play like mini-movies and will run on Super Sunday. The point of the 60second spots, each of which features the life story of an Olympic athlete, is to tug heartstrings and drive audience for the Pyeongchang Winter Games that begin on NBC four days after the Super Bowl on Feb. 4.
Networks running house ads during the Super Bowl is not new. Here’s what is: Hiring a top director and competing for top of mind with the other commercials that will run on a broadcast that’s as much the Super Bowl of advertising as it is a football game.
You’ll see skier Mikaela Shiffrin (and a child actor playing her) in a paean to girl power. You’ll see snowboarder Chloe Kim and her father in a passion play about sacrifice. You’ll see snowboarder Shaun White in a mind-bending parable about redemption. You’ll see figure skater Nathan Chen in a salute to the manly side of a sequined sport. And you’ll see skier Lindsey Vonn in a ligament-tearing hymn to toughness.
Jenny Storms, chief marketing officer for NBC Sports Group, tells USA TODAY that behind the high-end production values are American values such as resilience, boldness and determination. “We’re telling stories, true stories about real values, through the lens of the athletes and their histories,” she says. The ads will premiere one at a time on
Today on the weekday mornings leading up to the Super Bowl and through each of those days on a variety of other NBC platforms. Then, on Super Sunday, all five commercials will run pregame through postgame, including one on the episode of This Is Us that will air after the postgame festivities.
Super Bowl ads sell for an average north of $5 million for 30 seconds but less during the pregame and postgame shows. Taken together, Storms says the value of these five spots, had they been sold to other companies, is more than $20 million. She declines to specify the cost of producing them other than to say it is in the “healthy seven figures.”
The Super Bowl and the Winter Games haven’t aired on the same network since 1992, when CBS had Super Bowl XXVI on Jan. 26; the Albertville Games began in France on Feb. 8. This time the mega-events are separated by four days. All this, Storms says, is why NBC felt a need to produce promotional spots on an Olympian scale.
The network hired the ad agency Anomaly and, as director of the spots, Paul Hunter, who is well known as a director of music videos in addition to commercials. And these ads pulse like music videos, though NBC isn’t ready to release the iconic tracks you’ll hear. Suffice to say you’ll know them.
“It wasn’t necessarily purposeful,” Storms says, “but there is a strong female message here with three of the five ads centered around these amazing women.”
Storms says NBC tested the ads with audiences using galvanized skin response and eye tracking. The network also put the ads through a proprietary computer model that has analyzed all the ads from the last four Super Bowls on 575 variables. Storms says the Olympic spots scored as Super Bowl quality.
“Ultimately — and I’ve been a marketer for over 20 years — consumers are going to decide,” she says. “But knowing that we have information telling us that we have a good, stacked deck is great. … We are like any other brand trying to win the Super Bowl.”
“We’re telling stories, true stories about real values.”
Jenny Storms Chief marketing officer for NBC Sports Group