KAITLYN GALLO: Thank you, everyone, for joining us today for our conference call showcasing our results in advance to the 2024 Paris Olympics.
In a moment you will hear from NBC Universal president Dan Lovinger of Olympic and Paralympic partnerships who will share sales and advertising updates.
Following the call there will be an open Q&A.
DAN LOVINGER: Thank you, Kaitlyn. Hello, all, and thank you for being with us today.
On April 17 the 2024 Paris Olympics will be 100 days away, and while you've heard us say this before, this year's games will truly be unlike any other that we've seen before. The 2024 Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games will not only be the first games post-pandemic with fans back in the stands, but it'll be the biggest event of the year and the largest event of the decade to date.
Therefore, we're innovating and re-envisioning how the Games are presented to engage audiences of all ages and demographics.
During the daytime, we'll be broadcasting events live on NBC and Telemundo for Spanish speakers with more hours than ever before, and we'll reimagine our primetime shows with more of the athletes' stories that our viewers love and a more curated experience that allows new technologies to capture the action in exciting ways.
For the first time ever for the Summer Games, all events will stream live on Peacock and they'll be available on demand through an elegant new user interface our viewers are going to love.
Over the last few months we've had numerous announcements for Paris 2024, from iconic talent participation like Snoop Dogg doing man-about-town segments, Kelly Clarkson and Peyton Manning joining Mike Tirico for opening ceremonies, to Jimmy Fallon joining Mike to cohost closing ceremonies, to our new interactive Peacock watch parties, hosted by top podcaster and creator, Alice Cooper, to our new virtual concessions capabilities that will allow audiences to purchase food, beverages, and other items throughout their Olympic streaming journey.
Paris '24 is shaping up to be the biggest Games we've ever had across both linear and streaming, and to give you a sense of how impactful these Games will be for the advertising community, we can report that we have achieved $1.2 billion in ad sales commitments for Paris 2024, and with advertisers more eager than ever to be part of these Games, over $350 million of the $1.2 billion is from new advertisers.
We're also approaching a new ad revenue record with Paris 2024 on track to generate the most advertising revenue in Olympic history. I'll say it again: The most advertising revenue in Olympic history.
As the Games move to Paris, then Milano Cortina, and eventually to LA in 2028, there's an unquestioned resurgence in Olympic interest, which is why we have already sold out all our inventory for the both the opening and closing ceremonies across linear and digital platforms in these Paris games.
In fact, digitizing revenue for this year is already setting a new record, surpassing any digital ad revenue in the history of the Games.
Additionally, the success of Peacock has allowed us to enable more inventory. Digitizers will not only have access to all live streaming and simulcast events, but their ads will also flow through our host feeds, our interactive watch with Alice Cooper experience, the Gold Zone, and all the various ad innovations and formats we have on Peacock.
Brands also have the ability to leverage the power of social media for Paris '24 by advertising with us marketers that connect consumers via various social platforms knowing their ads will be housed among brand-safe content directly connected to the Games' competition.
Consistent with past Games, we are expecting the Olympic linear experience to be larger than all other broadcast and major cable audiences combined.
Quality reach in a mass environment have become few and far between which is a 6big reason we've sold out nearly 95 percent of our custom primetime marketing integrations. These highly customized primetime activations offer a select number of advertisers a unique opportunity to reach large scale Olympic audiences.
Also Olympic primetime sponsorships sold out almost immediately as advertisers were eager to partake in this new sponsorship that seamlessly integrates them into key moments on NBC's primetime coverage.
Every two years, the Olympics and Paralympic Games breaks through the cultural zeitgeist, bringing families and communities together to celebrate the world's sporting event, offering a unique and powerful opportunity to advertisers and sponsors.
We've invested heavily not only in the future to improve the viewer experience, but also to democratize our advertisers' access.
As we recently announced, Paris 2024 will be available for programatic buying for the first time in history, marking a new era to open access to leading premium live events.
We're offering every brand, regardless of their size, the opportunity to connect with highly engaged audiences tuning into the Games. No other property can change the vector of a brand's business or drive results like the Olympics can.
In a world where audiences have become more and more fragmented, we expect the Games to be the most watched media event of the year. The Olympics are also the perfect venue to reach female sports fans in an environment that celebrates and salutes women's athletics at the highest level. With the gargantuan ratings recently seen in the women's NCAA Tournament, the opportunity for advertisers to support women in sport and reach female viewers has never been greater with the Olympics.
In fact, over half of our primetime coverage is dedicated to women's sports during the Games, and 99 percent of broadcast primetime female coverage in a given Olympic year occurs during the Olympics.
With history in the making, this upcoming Games will be the first Olympics to achieve full gender parity, equal representation for both women and men.
We've made some large marketing bets with this years Games as well, launching an Olympic campaign earlier with more relevant talent and more frequency than ever before. From Paris Hilton to Dolly Parton to Peyton Manning and Megan Thee Stallion, Emily Collins, new Olympic fans are connecting with the franchise and planning to view.
Taking a new approach for such an iconic and loved event like this is never easy, but our decision to think big and provide an experience that's new and exciting for fans is certainly paying off.
With April 17th marking the official 100 days out until this year's opening ceremony, you can expect even more exciting announcements from NBC Universal in the next few weeks.
We'll be unveiling new social partners in the coming weeks that will allow us to usher in the next generation of viewers for the Games, and we'll be spotlighting five of our Olympic ring holder sponsors on The Today Show on April 17th.
I want to thank you all for joining us, and I hope you all tune into the Games when they kick off on Friday, July 26, as it truly will be the largest and the most inspiring Olympic and Paralympic Games to date.
Q. Dan, a couple things you mentioned. You mentioned the $1.2 billion being a record. I'm wondering what the previous sales high was; and then you mentioned five sponsors on 100 days activating, so just following up on those things. Then I know when we talked about this back in the fall, we talked about top or USOPC partners. I'm wondering what trend you're seeing from that set of advertisers.
DAN LOVINGER: Sure. First, I just want to clarify, the $1.2 billion is achieved today. The record is coming. We are highly confident that we will set a new record in ad revenue.
As far as support from top sponsors, whether they're IOC top partners or USOPC partners, we're seeing a significant upward trend in support from those ring holders.
Q. What is the current record and what are the partners who are going to be part of the 100 days, if you can say?
DAN LOVINGER: The 100 days, I don't think we can say because we haven't cleared it with them, but we're (indiscernible) April 17th.
I believe the top record is -- we're right in line with it. We're not quite there. We're going to go over that line quite shortly. It's been reported in the past, just slightly north of the 1.2.
Q. Wondering if you could get into categories a little bit for some of those returning advertisers, but especially the new ones that you mentioned where they're sort of popular industries they're coming from. What do those folks look like?
DAN LOVINGER: Sure, I'm happy to comment on some of the trends. I don't have it broken down by returning or new, but I think it's pretty representative across both of those sort of separate categories.
We're seeing significant increases in the non-alcoholic beverage category; the CPG category, financial services, retail all up nicely. Then I would also add in the entertainment category as another category that we're seeing increases in.
Q. The RNC and DNC conventions, how much do you think we're going to see global campaigns surface during the Olympics?
DAN LOVINGER: Historically, that's been more of a local trend, and so a number of the swing states supporting. We did see a bit of national (indiscernible) both the RNC and a few PACs in the prior Games.
Typically that support comes a little bit later. I would expect to see a bit of it. But we really intend for these Games to be red, white, and blue, not red or blue.
Q. Dan, I know you had mentioned the opening and closing are sold out. I'm wondering is there any other sports or parts of the Games where you see being sold out or particularly high demand or maybe an increased demand compared to what you would typically see?
DAN LOVINGER: Yeah, I also did mention that a new feature we're calling prime pods during our broadcasts are sold out. We're seeing significant sellouts in our halftime sponsorships for some of the team sports, notably basketball and soccer.
We always get requests for a sport-by-sport basis, and as you can imagine, sports like gymnastics, swimming, track and field, which are some of our most viewed sports, are where a lot of our advertisers like to find themselves.
Our belief that the Olympics are fantastic across the board, and we typically have our advertisers participating widely within the Games.
Q. You mentioned specifically the primetime sponsorships because those sold out pretty quickly. What was the timeline there? Around when did you start selling those?
DAN LOVINGER: We went into the market with those, I want to say -- I'd have to check my date, but I want to say close to a year ago, as we were developing a way to actually reduce our commercial minutes during 13 evenings of primetime. So we reconstructed a 30-minute segment in each of those 13 evenings to have limited commercial inventory.
In fact, there's only one 60-second spot, so that the athletes and the competition could be the star of that half hour.
So we went into the market and quickly saw all 13 of those primetime prime pods we're calling them, taken by our ring holders.
Q. Can you talk a bit about Peacock; it's the third go-around for Peacock for the Olympics. Big course direction between Tokyo and Beijing. Obviously from talking to some of your colleagues, it seems like there were a lot of learnings from that. Going to be extensive live coverage now (interruption).
DAN LOVINGER: We lost you. Start that question again.
Q. Wanted to get a thought or two from you on Peacock and its evolution from your perspective on the advertising and partnership side.
DAN LOVINGER: Sure. I think you mentioned from Tokyo to Beijing was a significant improvement in our Peacock user interface. It was also a significant addition to the amount of content we were able to populate on Peacock.
As we get to Paris, these will be the first Summer Games where every event will be available on Peacock, both the simul-streams of our broadcast and cable networks, as well as bespoke programming such as the Gold Zone, which will be exclusive to Peacock.
If a viewer wants to watch any of the host feed, which is sort of the feed that the IBC provides, we can make that available. You will be able to watch anything you want, whenever you want on Peacock.
A lot of work has gone into understanding consumer engagement and providing a user interface that is incredibly elegant that was recently revealed at our 124 event by John Jelley.
I think that the viewers are going to find the Peacock experience extraordinary. It's going to allow them to not just watch live, but to add things that they want to their my stuff folder, to be able to come back and watch events as they see fit.
And I think that the scale of Peacock has also grown significantly, certainly since Tokyo and Beijing, with the consistent additions of subscribers that we've reported over time. We're now at a place where Peacock is a scalable opportunity in and of itself.
One thing that we do like to stress is that as we've seen all of our other sports, whether it's the NFL, the Premier League, golf, add viewers from Peacock; it has not cannibalized from the linear offerings.
If you look at our NFL ratings this past season, they're up linear and certainly up massively digital. I think we can anticipate a similar trend with the Olympics: Great user experience and scalable viewership through Peacock.
Hopefully that's helpful.
Q. Some advertisers have kind of come to you looking to participate on the Peacock side would you say?
DAN LOVINGER: Sure, they have indeed. I don't know if I was clear with my earlier comments, but we've already surpassed our past digitizing Olympic record with more than 100 days to go.
What we've done with Peacock is we've democratized the ability for advertisers to be part of the Olympics. In the past when it was strictly a linear experience, the cost of entry was quite significant just for a primetime spot.
But now with the ability to market one to few rather than one of one to everyone, it opens up the aperture of how many advertisers can be part of the Olympic experience.
Q. Wanted to follow up on what you mentioned from what we saw in the women's NCAA Tournament, the overall rising interest in women's sports viewership. The Olympics always tend to be a bit more egalitarian in terms of that, but on the advertiser side, how did you see that? Is it the types of brands that you're getting, the campaigns they're testing? Where are the tangible signs of that interest playing a role here?
DAN LOVINGER: Yeah, I think all of the above. We've seen advertisers specifically come to the Olympics to reach women viewers. We've seen advertisers specifically come to the Olympics to support female Olympians, and perhaps they're even part of their rosters.
But overall -- and it's not just the Olympics. I can say across NBC Universal and all of our sports properties, we are seeing a surge of interest in reaching women and supporting women in sport. What Caitlin Clark and all of the women's NCAA Tournament has done for women's sports is remarkable, really, really remarkable, and the Olympics stands prepared probably -- not probably -- but certainly more than any other sport to continue that sport.
I mentioned earlier that 99 percent of all broadcast primetime sport featuring women in an Olympic year is during the Olympics. Hopefully that changes and others catch up. But the Olympics is the ideal place to reach women, to support women, and we're very, very proud of that.
KAITLYN GALLO: Thank you so much, Dan. For those of you interested in receiving it, we will have a transcript of the call. If you have any questions regarding the bullets that Dan shared with you today, also from a comms perspective we can share that with you directly.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports