By Stefanie Morales
At the halfway point of the 2022 Winter Olympics, viewership has largely stayed at the levels with which it began. To date, the Olympics are down 46% in total viewers compared to 2018 and 57% among adults 18-49 (31% and 43%, respectively) compared to the Summer Games in 2021.
This year, NBC had the unique opportunity to air both the Olympics and the Super Bowl on the same day after switching contract years with CBS in 2019. In past years, the Super Bowl has taken place the weekend prior to the Opening Ceremony, but, due to scheduling, the two events were set to overlap. With the broadcast rights for both major sporting events, NBC opted to air live Olympic coverage in the post-Super Bowl prime time slot rather than spotlight an entertainment program (which has been customary for many years). Sunday night’s telecast featured the medal rounds of women’s monobob (single bobsled) in the sport’s Olympic debut and the ice dancing free dance. The U.S. took home both the gold and silver in the monobob as well as the bronze in ice dancing.
Airing in the post-Super Bowl slot gave the Olympics a huge viewing boost, bringing in over 21 million viewers and a 5.61 rating among adults 18-49. This was a 30% increase compared to the same night in 2018 among total viewers, an 84% increase among adults 18-34, and a 47% increase among adults 18-49. Viewing was twice as high as the same day for the 2021 Summer Games with a 150% increase among adults 18-34 and a 95% increase among adults 18-49. The adult 18-34 rating of 4.47 was higher than the previous four days combined (Wednesday- Saturday). With both events airing the same day, NBC estimates they delivered 6.4 billion ad impressions on the NBC broadcast network alone across the full broadcast day, including pre-game broadcasts and Olympic programming.
While Olympic viewing soared on Sunday night, the decision did not have a lasting effect as Monday’s figures fell to just 7.8 million viewers. Tuesday’s prime time delivery rose slightly to 8.7 million (an 11% boost), but Wednesday’s prime telecast recorded just 6.9 million viewers, the lowest prime viewership of the 2022 Games to date. Tuesday’s telecast included the marquee event of women’s figure skating, which is embroiled in controversy. Fifteen-year-old Russian Figure Skater Kamila Valieva was found to have a banned substance in her system during routine drug testing prior to the Olympic Games. Despite testing positive, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled she could still participate in the Olympics, a decision that has drawn severe criticism from experts and athletes across multiple sports. Amplifying the issue, the country of Russia is currently serving a two-year suspension from World and Olympic competitions due an investigation from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) that found a years-long, state-sponsored doping scheme. Athletes were allowed to participate in both the Summer 2021 and Winter 2022 Games under a neutral flag identified as ROC (Russian Olympic Committee). The final round of women’s figure skating aired live on Thursday morning on USA with a replay on NBC’s prime time Thursday night. Ratings for that telecast will be available later today.
Outside of broadcast and cable TV, streaming continues to be record-breaking. On Sunday night, 1.5 million viewers streamed prime time coverage, the largest Olympic streaming audience to date according to NBC. The Olympics Total Audience Delivery, an internal NBCU metric, reached a total of 24 million viewers across all platforms, the largest Olympic prime time audience since the opening Sunday of the 2018 Winter Games. As of February 15th, users have streamed a total of 3.13 billion minutes across NBCUniversal’s digital platforms, setting the record for the most-streamed Winter Games ever and surpassing 2018 PyeongChang’s 2.17 billion minutes.
Streaming measurement company Conviva is reporting a 349% increase in streaming for the 2022 Opening Ceremony compared to the 2018 Opening Ceremony. Smart TVs and connected devices accounted for over 40% of total streaming, but tablets came in as a surprisingly significant device accounting for 28% of streaming time, over-indexing the 5% average for total video streaming in fourth quarter 2021. This is likely due to viewers streaming the telecast live as they went about their day.
Social media continues to be the go-to place for non-competition content, including commentary, conversation, and behind-the-scenes footage from competing athletes. The U.S. Olympic Committee topped 2.2 million TikTok followers, more than twice the next largest federation. Brazil (a bigger force in the Summer Olympics) was second with 1 million followed by Italy at 467,000. TikTok saw 1.7 million installs in the U.S. from February 4 to 12, according to data from Sensor Tower, topping the 1.1 million installs for Instagram and 1 million for YouTube. Excluding TikTok, Twitter led social content produced by official federations in the week leading up to the Games with a 37% share. Instagram, however, was the most engaged audience with a 66% share of engagements.
2022 Winter Olympics Kick Off Amid Political Controversy and COVID Concerns
By Stefanie Morales
Background
Last week marked the start of the 2022 Winter Olympics, just six months after the Summer Olympics of 2021 which were delayed one year due to COVID-19. From the beginning, the Winter Olympics were expected to face a series of challenges in both viewership and execution. Held in Beijing, China – home of the Summer 2008 Olympics – many experts questioned the ability of Beijing to host a winter games in a region that typically did not receive enough snow for winter sports. While many past host cities have also needed to create artificial snow to maintain ideal conditions, Beijing did not have the resources already in place including a strong water supply. Additional concerns came as the opening ceremony inched closer and the U.S. called for a diplomatic boycott of the Games due to concerns around China’s human rights issues and government politics. Australia, Canada, Denmark, and the UK also called for similar boycotts.
On the consumption side of things, as we saw with the 2020 Summer Olympics, shifting consumer viewing behaviors have changed the way in which we view TV and especially large-scale events. The 2022 Winter Olympics are taking place in a similar time zone to that of Tokyo, which introduces another layer of challenges with spoiler headlines across social media and even NBC’s own properties that were prevalent this past summer.
TV coverage this weekend was concentrated on just two networks–NBC and USA–due the NBC Sports Network going off the air at the end of 2021. CNBC added coverage on Saturday only to date and will air sporadic coverage of Curling and Hockey throughout the Games. After much criticism last summer, NBC changed the way they air and release coverage on Peacock, their streaming app. Peacock subscribers will have full access to all Olympic coverage through the app, both live and through on-demand replays in an effort to streamline the consumer experience outside of scheduled TV. Streaming is also available through the NBC Sports app and website for viewers with a cable subscription.
In another lesson learned from last summer’s Olympics, NBCU has partnered with TikTok for the Winter Games. During the Tokyo Games, we watched as Olympic athletes took to the platform during their time at the Olympic Villages as well as post-competition. Gymnast Suni Lee raked in 31 million views on her celebratory TikTok video following her gold medal performance in the all-around, while several other athletes generated large followings as well. According to NBCU, TikTok videos with Olympic-related hashtags have generated 18 billion views to date (prior to the start of the 2022 Games). Under this partnership, advertisers will be able to pilot new ad formats and creative experiences on the platform.
Viewership
Broadcast and cable viewing continues to be challenging for NBCUniversal. Like last summer, NBC aired the Opening Ceremony live on air in the early morning hours, followed by an edited primetime telecast. Combined, the two telecasts reached 13.7 million viewers and a 2.4 rating among adults 18-49, down 51% and 63%, respectively compared to 2018. While the Winter Games are typically lower-rated than the Summer Games, the prime time telecast was down just 12% from the Summer Opening Ceremony prime telecast among total viewers, led by slight growth among adults 55+. The increase in the 55+ audience further shows the dichotomy between older viewers and younger viewers when it comes to scheduled TV.
Despite the significant declines for the Opening Ceremony, the primetime airing was still by far the most-watched telecast of the day. Among adults 18-49, the Opening Ceremony delivered more than three times the ratings of its closest competition. Univision’s telenovelas, Vener El Pasado had a 0.61 rating while Madre and Soltero Con Hijas delivered a 0.56 rating. The top English-language program of the day was FOX’s WWE Smackdown with a 0.51, nearly 300% lower than the Opening Ceremony.
Saturday and Sunday’s Olympic coverage across all dayparts is running about 30-70% down from 2018 among adults 18-49. USA’s prime time airing on Saturday night fared the best (compared to NBC Sport’s Network in 2018) in terms of declines. The network aired live Snowboarding including the medal round for Women’s Snowboard Slopestyle where the U.S.’s Julia Marino pulled off a surprise upset and took home the silver and the first medal of the Games.
Streaming continues to break records throughout the three official days of competition so far. Per NBCU, Peacock marked the highest number of content starts in platform history on Saturday. Saturday was also the most streamed Winter Olympics day ever to date across the NBCU portfolio, with 323 million minutes consumed. By Sunday evening, total digital usage, led by Peacock, topped one billion minutes – marking the fastest the milestone has been reached for a Winter Games.
NBCUniversal is also reporting on several ad-impression metrics from iSpot. According to internal data, NBCU ran a 42% lighter ad load than other broadcast networks during the Opening Ceremony on Friday, which delivered 17% more impressions per ad unit. On Saturday, the NBCU platforms ran 14% lighter ad-load with 247% more impressions per ad unit, and on Sunday NBC networks had 33% lighter ad load and delivered 241% more ad impressions per unit. Also, per NBC, 14.5 million people viewed the advertising pod immediately after Mikaela Shiffrin’s race at 8:40pm on Sunday.
Twitter leads the third Media Responsibility Index, as Mediabrands/MAGNA mulls expanding beyond just social media
By Michael Bürgi, Published by Digiday
It’s fair to say the major social media platforms that take up so much of people’s time and attention have made some progress in trying to ensure their environments are safer for consumers and advertisers — but it’s probably more accurate to say they still have a long way to go cleaning up their acts.
Those shortcomings were a major motivator for IPG’s Mediabrands and MAGNA units to issue their Media Responsibility Index (MRI) report every six months, starting back in early 2021. Essentially offering what it says is an unbiased assessment of the social media platforms’ efforts in areas such as data collection and use; mis- and dis-information levels; advertising transparency; promoting respect and diversity; monitoring and limiting hate speech; enforcing policies; and highlighting accountability, the report relies on responses from the platforms as well as some original reportage and social listening.
Digiday got a first look at the third installment of the MRI, which is being released today.
New areas of focus within the MRI questionnaire sent to Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter and YouTube (LinkedIn was sent a questionnaire, but declined to respond) include: biometric data collection and storage; gender identity and ad targeting; hate-speech policies; reporting of BIPOC and underrepresented creators; misinformation labels; and others.
As evidence of the need for the MRI, the report states upfront the fact that “64 percent of Americans say social media has a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the U.S. today.”
But since social media isn’t the only way Americans digest content and opinions, future installments of the MRI will aim to expand to other media, according to Elijah Harris, executive vp of global digital partnerships & media responsibility at MAGNA, who oversees the report. “In order for us to scale it and make a bigger impact, it’s going to require us to expand the media types we look at … We’re still covering a minority of the investment pie,” he said.
Harris added another expansion plan for MRI is to enable IPG’s various countries and regions to customize elements of the report to their local needs and challenges. “The goal is to, at some point get everywhere our clients are spending, and that’s a big pie,” added Dani Benowitz, MAGNA’s U.S. president.
IPG is not alone in its efforts to move the industry forward when it comes to issues of brand safety, representation, enforcement against bad-actor behavior, data accuracy and eliminating bias — each of the holding companies devotes significant energies to at least a few of these areas. But arguably, the MRI is the most broad, tackling five different elements of evaluation of the social platforms’ efforts in media responsibility:
- advertising controls
- enforcement
- policy
- reporting
- user controls
“We’re constantly adapting it to change with what’s going on around us,” said Benowitz. “Our clients are 100 percent asking for this from us, they’re expecting it from us. They’re leaning on us to hold our media partners accountable and hold them accountable — and they want guidance from us on how to do that.”
“Safety is a constantly evolving topic,” said David Byrne, TikTok’s global head of brand safety and industry relations. “What may have been ‘best in class’ last year quickly becomes industry-standard, highlighting the importance of being proactive.
Of all the platforms that responded, Twitter emerged with the best overall performance across the platforms, noted Harris. In the report, the platform improved its performance over prior reports in all elements of evaluation except advertising controls.
Caitlin Rush, Twitter’s head of global brand safety strategy, said the report has helped Twitter keep better track of its own progress in areas beyond brand safety. “As we get into a year-plus of MRI under our belts, we’re able to see and measure the progress we’re making. Having this longevity of ups and downs has been really helpful for us,” she said.
Rush also noted the widened scope of brand safety as an important factor of the MRI. “Some of the topics that have evolved in the report are starting to emphasize bigger-picture things like how is your company supporting DE&I goals, and what are you doing to support responsible machine learning and algorithmic transparency?”
Citing the release of the Facebook Papers and Frances Haugen’s whistleblower testimony last fall, the report also shows that Facebook, while making progress, has also been caught obfuscating its darker elements.
As Harris explained, “When it comes to the foundation of their policies, the controls Meta’s platforms use and the detection techniques they leverage, there’s absolute industry leadership within those systems,” he said. “What hinders them is the consistency by which they enforce their policies and rules, which is where things start to go awry. We and other industry bodies have been encouraging that platform in particular to work with independent parties, specifically when it comes to how they report on prevalence of harmful or violating content.”
Ultimately, the third MRI makes the following recommendations to the platforms:
- Expand the labeling of all platform policy violating content
- Platforms should all audit for algorithmic bias
- Platforms should also be more careful
- Industrywide adoption of a violative view rate, a measure that’s been developed recently by YouTube and Snap that “contextualizes, as a percentage, views of offending content relative to all content views on a platform.”
- Platforms should work in collaboration with each other in limiting “harmful content,” as suggested by a TikTok memorandum of understanding it proposed to the other social platforms.
“We regularly partner with experts, industry organizations, and brand partners to help inform our policies, practices, and solutions,” said TikTok’s Byrne. “As an industry, it’s vital to be transparent in order to build and maintain trust among our community of users, creators and brands.”
Read the article at Digiday
Google Announces Topics as a Replacement for FLoCs
By MAGNA and Kinesso
This week, Google announced a new Privacy Sandbox proposal for interest-based advertising called Topics API. The development of Topics API improves upon many of the shortcomings of the previous FLoC trials, which were discontinued in July 2021. FLoCs grouped users based on cohorts, which generated concerns amongst privacy advocates that it would lead to fingerprinting and the ability to distinguish an individual user’s browser from within the larger cohort. Topics instead are primarily derived from user browsing history from past sites and manually curated into standardized IAB content taxonomies. This will allow advertisers to target in a more general fashion using topics such as Auto & Vehicles or Books & Literature with an initial launch of 300+ Topics. This manual curation of topics would potentially enable better user privacy as compared to third-party cookie-based targeting. In addition, Topics APIs approach is supposed to reduce cross-site identification by having different topics on each site, and calls to the Topics API can only be made to eligible site partners.
Topics will be generated for users at the domain or subdomain level of sitemaps and stored for three weeks at a time. Users will be able to view or remove specific categories or disable the feature entirely, thereby supporting better user controls when compared to previously proposed privacy sandbox solutions.
Testing will take place over the coming year with hopes to gain approval among users and privacy advocates alike.
With the deprecation of third-party cookies pushed until late 2023, this is a reminder of the clear erosion of targeting accuracy in cookie replacement technologies to become privacy compliant. Consent remains a key focus for both client and publishers. Kinesso will be exploring how Google governs consent as Topics are managed and/or manipulated.
As the Adtech arm of IPG, Kinesso continues to partner with Google to understand user consent management within Topics and will test Topics effectiveness as a cookie replacement solution. This update renews the emphasis on first-party data and the need for alternative solutions to increase addressability across the entire ecosystem. As such, Kinesso, MAGNA and Acxiom are continuing conversations with publishers to build out Kii-based integrations that will enable addressability via first-party data.
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NEW INNOVATION MEASUREMENT INDEX SHOWS WHICH SECTORS ARE BOOMING—AND WHICH ARE STAGNANT
By Ethan Jakob Craft, Published in Ad Age.
The brainchild of IPG Media Lab and Magna, the new Innovation Velocity Gauge shows ‘territories’ like blockchain and cross-screen measurement in the lead
The concept of “innovation” can seem difficult to measure, leading IPG Media Lab and Magna to create the so-called “Innovation Velocity Gauge” comparing just how rapidly more than two dozen industries are evolving relative to one another.
Emerging technologies, also referred to as “innovation territories,” can grow at wildly different speeds, said Richard Yao, IPG Media Lab’s manager of strategy and content. The new gauge will fill the “one missing piece” that has proven to be a hiccup in the industry’s efforts to track, and visualize, just how those sectors evolve, he said.
“‘Metaverse’ has been on our radar since 2009, but the last year was really a breakout year for it,” for example, Yao said. Indeed, all things metaverse had a moment in 2021, and that attention from both consumers and corporations is reflected in the Innovation Velocity Gauge; it’s ranked 10th among the 27 tech-driven verticals analyzed in the tool’s inaugural run.
Leading the pack in first place is “cross-screen measurement”—hardly a surprise given long-dominant Nielsen’s measurement stumbles that came to light early in 2021, which have since opened the door for a crush of cutting-edge competitors to make inroads with legacy media giants like NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS. Industry groups, including both the Association of National Advertisers and Video Advertising Bureau, have also echoed calls to expand the use of comprehensive, alternative measurement currencies.
The No. 2 innovator on the list is “blockchain,” which has generated significant buzz this past year not just for its ties to cryptocurrency but also as the technological basis upon which non-fungible tokens are created, stored and traded.
Rounding out the top five are “visual search” in third place, “machine learning” in fourth, and “digital finance” in fifth. The tail end of the gauge includes digital health, over-the-top broadcasting and wearable technology, whose collective pace of innovation was on the slower side because they’re currently past their initial growth spurts.
How is innovation, a subjective idea that has little definition from industry to industry, being measured?
“We wanted to help kind of put some data behind— put some speed behind these innovation territories,” said Brian Hughes, executive VP, managing director of audience intelligence and strategy at Magna.
To do that, the gauge looks at three key metrics: social listening, which includes tracking keywords and mentions of certain sectors across social media; media analysis, using the frequency of certain article topics in both consumer-facing and trade news publications to see what’s making headlines; and proprietary ad spending data, which Magna’s already familiar with thanks to its robust data and forecasting capabilities.
To paint a fairly accurate picture of innovation across more than two dozen tech-based disciplines, Yao emphasizes that metrics are weighted on a case-by-case basis. “It’s not one-third of this, one-third of that,” he said.
For example, Yao continues, buzzworthy “innovation territories” like gaming and the metaverse have gotten lots of consumer attention recently and are prone to score near the top of Magna and IPG Media Lab’s social listening analysis; meanwhile, the average TV viewer isn’t talking much about “cross-screen measurement,” which gets lots of press in trade publications but isn’t generating much mainstream social media discussion.
That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s innovating slower than the widely known likes of virtual reality and podcasting—in fact, cross-screen measurement is moving faster than both of those, according to the gauge. And to reflect that, it’s imperative that all data points are not compared and weighed equally across the tool’s 27 very distinct sections.
The Innovation Velocity Gauge does not have a baseline zero where different “innovation territories” can be judged as excelling or falling behind, Hughes confirmed; instead, each point on the gauge is measured on a relative scale and then placed against each of the 26 other points.
The creators of the gauge plan to update it annually, eventually using each gauge as a standard to detect changes by comparing it to the subsequent year’s gauge, he said.
“Because this is the first year we’re doing this, our hope is that next year, we have this as the baseline and we can compare year-over-year growth,” Yao added.
View Innovation Velocity Gauge