IN THE SUNNY outlook competition, downhill freestyle division, NBC Universal TV Group prexy/COO Randy Falco takes the gold.
"This is why the Olympics are so valuable -- they're an amazingly powerful promotional platform," he told the Los Angeles Times, spraying perfume on the disappointing ratings.
A promotional platform? Sure. But a reliable way to launch programs? Not compared with "American Idol," "Lost" and other regular franchises that deliver viewers right to a new show's doorstep -- which, even then, usually doesn't work -- as opposed to hoping they'll find their way back in a few weeks.
Using the Olympics, Super Bowl, Oscars or Grammys to showcase new series has always been a swell-sounding idea. In this way, these glossy, expensive properties serve a dual purpose -- offering the host network a conduit to bombard viewers with promos and entice them to sample the merchandise.
Yet how can ABC expect big tune-in because of ads during the Super Bowl and Oscars when more than half the "Dancing With the Stars" audience won't sit still for "Crumbs" -- just as 60% of "American Idol"-ators bow out of "Bones" and "Lost" addicts flee "Invasion" as if their houses are ablaze?Sometimes, we get so focused on the gee-whiz tech revolution we forget the one happening here and now, operating a gadget as common as the remote control in tandem with 100 channels. Instead of waiting for TiVo and video-on-demand to break down network schedules, viewers are doing a pretty good job of it themselves.
This isn't to say that advertising and lead-ins don't matter. "Desperate Housewives" clearly helped get the "Grey's Anatomy" party started, and the medical drama's post-Super Bowl cliffhanger ratcheted up the series a few more notches.
That baton pass, though, was direct -- none of this "Come back in three weeks" nonsense, but rather, "Wait, don't turn yet! Just give us a chance, please!"
So inertia is still a factor, but increasingly less so -- particularly within younger demographics that consume media more actively. From that perspective, it's no accident that CBS, which has the oldest audience profile, remains the network where lead-in retention is the most beneficial -- where people stick around for "Courting Alex" because it follows "Two and a Half Men" and precedes "CSI: Miami." Besides, it's in color, so why clap it off?
Despite all the NBC promos sandwiched into the net's Olympic coverage, expecting viewers to obligingly return for the new drama "Conviction" somehow seems dated, or perhaps more accurately inefficient -- employing a shotgun approach, with apologies to Vice President Dick Cheney, at a time when most people indulge in a few appointment shows and beyond that can't be bothered even to check local listings.
Networks have historically referred to the predominantly male crowd that tunes in solely for the NCAA Basketball Tournament or World Series as "borrowed audience," since many of them won't check out a new series under any circumstances. At least with the Winter Olympics and Oscars, the audience is heavily female, offering NBC and ABC a better chance, theoretically, of translating their marketing efforts into midseason dividends for femme-oriented shows.
We'll see, and in the quest for ratings there's nothing wrong with being a borrower. It's just that in today's TV environment it feels less likely that spraying a borrowed audience with promos is going to yield much interest.
OLYMPIC CHILLS: Overlooked amid the hang-wringing over the Winter Games has been the army of print reporters dispatched to cover them.
If the Olympics have underperformed for NBC, what about for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and other newspapers that shipped half their sports staffs to Italy and produced special wraparound sections -- at best sparingly polluted by advertising -- at a time when said papers are suffering through substantial pressure to reduce costs?
The lingering impact of this Olympiad will be interesting to see in the future, beginning with China in 2008. NBC's "Today" has a vested interest in shilling for the Games, but other media outlets might be inclined to reconsider committing to wall-to-wall sports coverage as opposed to staffing the event like a news story.
In concept, of course, the Olympics remain a noble endeavor, but the real gold resides in their commercial power, which invites this question: Why breathlessly blanket every jump and landing of an event that people couldn't be bothered to watch in the first place?
Contact Brian Lowry at
brian.lowry@variety.com