Digital boosts NBC Olympics ads to $1B

The 2012 Summer Games may go down in history as the first “social media Olympics.” Some fans are claiming the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver were the first to be “socialized,” but one look at what’s in store for the 2012 games and it’s clear: the Olympics have never been seen, heard, or tweeted like this. And NBC, always at the forefront of Olympic coverage, is pushing that envelope with partnerships with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr and it seems, just about every other platform on the web. More importantly, NBC’s bottom line has been fattened with its push into digital platforms, saying it hit a record $1 billion in ad revenues by last Thursday. That number includes $60 million in digital ads, up 200% from the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. NBCOlympics.com will live-stream more than 3,500 hours of the Olympics and two apps will take the Games uber-mobile. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Stewart, put it this way: “In many ways, this summer’s London Olympics will be a monumental experiment for network television in the digital age.”

Of all the social platforms engaging in the Olympics, Twitter is getting the most attention—perhaps because it’s seen as taking the biggest risk. In partnership with NBC, Twitter will create a “news hub” for the games, a move that GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram sees as meaning that the microblogging service is “about to jump into the global media game with both feet.” Twitter is so much ingrained into the Games, in fact, that the London Eye, the ferris wheel on the banks of the River Thames, has been rigged to light up in concert with how the Twitter community is feeling about the games that day. If tweeps are happy, it will glow yellow. Not so happy and it will turn purple. Slate’s Will Oremus wrote: “If it sounds like an epic MIT student prank crossed with a bizarre corporate social media campaign, that’s because that’s pretty much what it is.”

• NBC Lays Out Final Digital Plans for Olympics (Broadcasting & Cable)

• NBC Says It Has Reached $1 Billion in Olympics Advertising (New York Times)

• London 2012: The Thrills (and Agony) of the Social Olympics (MediaShift)

• In Age of Twitter, NBC Rewrites Olympic Playbook (Wall Street Journal)

• Twitter as media: Its ambitions grow with NBC Olympic deal (GigaOm)

• Twitter Embraces Olympics To Train for the Big Time (Wall Street Journal)

• NBC and Facebook to Announce Olympics Partnership (New York Times)

• London vs Vancouver: who hosted first ‘social media Olympics’? (Vancouver Sun)

• Twitter Campaign Turns London Eye Into Olympic-Sized Mood Ring (Slate)

• Olympics-Social media will kill off armchair sports fans (Reuters)