FeedMedia: WEEK’s ads intruding on Olympic coverage
August 8, 2008 in On the Media Tags: Advertising, Olympic Games, WEEK
I’m sitting here watching the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games, and I’m growing increasingly annoyed at the annoying pop-up ad for Sherman’s that WEEK is running. It’s bad enough during regular television shows because they tend to make it hard to get lost in the story. But the graphics are covering up the information that NBC is running across the bottom of the screen.
WEEK is the highest-rated station in the Peoria market. Granite Broadcasting cannot be so hard-up for money that they must run these ads. Stop it. It’s the Olympics for crying out load.
If you feel the same way, contact the general manager.
August 9th, 2008 at 7:55 am
The ads didn’t appear on the HD broadcast.
August 9th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Bill,
This is not an ad associated with the Olympics. It is part of an FCC-mandated program to remind viewers that the digital conversion is coming in Febraury. All broadcast stations have a specific number of mentions that are tracked by the FCC by quarter. These include promotional spots, crawls, graphics that appear in newscasts (these are the countdown graphics you now see in every WEEK newscast) as well as “pop-up” ads, which are called snipes. Bottom line is that these must air in specific dayparts including prime regardless of programming.
August 9th, 2008 at 10:43 am
We tried watching the opening ceremonies, but the amount of ads reminded me of the Super Bowl. We didn’t last long.
August 9th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
The number of ad breaks and ads themselves were excessive. You would think that there comes a point of diminishing returns on the number of ads you put into a program.
August 11th, 2008 at 10:33 am
One last comment, the commercial load is the same as in past years inlcuding Athens and Sydney. Commercial load is within Olympic committee parameters.
The national ratings for NBC Network for Beijing are the highest in more than a decade, so commercial load does not appear to be an issue with regard to viewership. Last night, Sunday, one-fourth of all TV’s in the U.S. were tuned to Olympic coverage on NBC. That is a measurement of actual TV sets, not merely viewers. The viewership is huge so far.
Remember that NBC must recoup the nearly $1 billion in rights fees, plus the expense of coverage which includes some of the most sophisticated camera-work and reporting ever experienced, all in high definition.
I believe the coverage has been outstanding and we at WEEK are thrilled with the network at this point.