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Asked which brands are onboard to sponsor the Event of the Night segment, Dan Lovinger, president of Olympic and Paralympic Sales for NBC Universal, declined to name specific advertisers. But he noted that they were “blue chip” supporters of the games and credited Solomon with devising the idea of making room for a branded segment within Primetime in Paris.
“Our obligation was to go to our ringholders first, whether they were partners with the International Olympics Committee or the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee,” Lovinger said of how potential sponsors were approached. “So that’s who we went to—there may be one or two others.”
Mark Marshall, NBCU’s chairman of global advertising and partnerships, also teased some “new blood” among the brands featured across the Olympics.
“Due to digital and programmatic ads, we have a lot of advertisers that will get to be a part of the Games that maybe didn’t have the budgets to do that in the past,” Marshall said. “You’ll see that we’ll have more advertisers than have ever been in the Games before.”
Though NBCU was already on track to pass the previous Olympics ad sales record, advertisers still have time to buy their placements. “We’re still selling,” Lovinger said. “We hope and anticipate that we’ll sell through the Games.”
Call Her Peacock
By NBCU’s own admission, its signature streaming service wasn’t ready for primetime during the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. “Frankly, we didn’t do a very good job for our customers,” Mark Lazarus, NBCU Media Group chairman, remarked during the Studio 8H presentation. “We didn’t deliver exactly what we were going to deliver.”