How NBCU Is Setting Up ‘Blue Chip’ Advertisers and AI for Olympics Gold

How do you make sure the biggest sports event of the year is also the biggest media event of the year? Bring on the branded content, Gen Z-friendly streaming series and generative AI.

Those are the fresh ingredients NBCUniversal is mixing into its coverage of the 2024 Olympic Games, unfolding in Paris from July 26 through Aug. 11. “We like to raise the bar,” Comcast Corporation president Mike Cavanagh said during a preview of NBCU’s Olympics strategy held Wednesday at Rockefeller Center’s famed Studio 8H—the home of Saturday Night Live.

That strategy will encompass a grand total of 7,000 hours of coverage across every one of the media giant’s linear, digital and streaming platforms. “All of this is going to bring America even closer to the action and excitement, and present an Olympics that will be unforgettable,” Cavanagh promised.

The main event

With apologies to Law & Order creator Dick Wolf, NBC’s biggest drama during the Olympics is going to be Primetime in Paris. Hosted by NBC Sports’ regular Olympics emcee Mike Tirico, the broadcast network’s 8-11 p.m. programming block has been reimagined as a curated three-hour experience that takes viewers on a narrative-driven journey through the major wins and losses of each and every Games day.

“It’s our opportunity to focus on the moments that surround the events,” Molly Solomon, executive producer and president of NBC Olympics Production, said from the Studio 8H stage. “I believe the Olympics are the best reality show in the world.”

And just like Top Chef or The Voice, each episode of Primetime in Paris will have a dramatic arc. Speaking with ADWEEK after the presentation, Solomon said the show’s narrative will steadily build to a branded climactic sequence called Event of the Night, a half-hour segment dedicated to at least one key event presented by big name sponsors with fewer commercial breaks.

“At around 9:45 each night, we’re going to reach the apex of the show, which will be Event of the Night or Events of the Night,” Solomon revealed. “For the next 30 minutes, we’re going to use all our storytelling firepower around those events to bring them to life and tell stories about the athletes. It’s going to be sponsored, and it will have limited commercial interruption.”

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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.”

Four years later, Peacock is taking center stage in Paris, streaming 5,000 hours out of NBCU’s total 7,000 hours of coverage. “We’ll stream every sport, every event and all 329 medal ceremonies,” promised Peacock president Kelly Campbell.

Some of those 5,000 hours will be given over to Peacock-exclusive Olympics originals fronted by famous faces familiar to Gen Z. For example, comedians Kevin Hart and Kenan Thompson are joining forces for an eight-episode Olympics Highlights series where the duo provide joke-driven commentary on the major events of the games. Think “Weekend Update Goes to the Olympics.”

Meanwhile, podcast superstar Alex Cooper is getting her own Andy Cohen-esque showcase, Watch with Alex Cooper. Campbell described Cooper’s show as a “series of live interactive watch parties” where the Call Her Daddy host assembles her friends to cheer on Team USA and interact with fans in real time via social media.

“I thought, ‘What can we do that’s different on Peacock?’” Cooper said during the presentation, adding that she’s specifically focused on engaging her Gen Z audience in all the Olympics drama.

“You gotta be a little ADHD,” she joked about getting younger viewers to pay attention to the Games. “I want them to know, ‘You can fit in on my show. We’re just going to be hanging out and talking.’”

Speaking with reporters after the presentation, Campbell elaborated on how Peacock’s Olympics strategy reflects the streamer’s emphasis on using sports to introduce new subscribers to its original programming. “Sports plays a really big role in hooking new subscribers, and then they discover all of the entertainment content we have so they don’t churn out,” she noted.

Artificial Al-telligence

It was left to Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts to unveil what’s bound to be one of NBCU’s most consequential—and controversial—Olympics programming moves: the AI-powered Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock.

Available starting July 27 via web browsers, select mobile and tablet devices, and the Peacock app, Your Daily Olympic Recap allows users to build their own personalized highlight reel of the previous day’s events. And as an added bonus, all of those highlights are narrated by legendary sportscaster Al Michaels.

Since it would obviously take a miracle for the real Michaels to narrate millions of video clips, NBCU employed AI voice synthesis technology to replicate his immediately recognizable inflections.

“What’s incredible to me is how much the voiceover sounds like Al Michaels,” Roberts enthused about the synthetic Michaels, who addresses each user by name before throwing to their selected clips. He made sure to mention that Michaels was a “terrific partner” in the process.

“The AI engine was trained using his past appearances on NBC,” Roberts continued. “We expect as many as 7 million variations of these personalized playlists will be streamed throughout the course of the Games.”