Dive Brief:
- Only 41 brands ran ad campaigns during the Rio Olympic Games that used TV, display, native, video and mobile ad units, according to Media Radar, as reported by Ad Week.
- Of the 555 TV advertisers, 412 (or 74%) also ran digital ad campaigns, with 107 running native ads, 128 running digital video ads, and 242 also running mobile ads.
- Media Radar found that DirecTV and Ancestry.com ran the most TV ads during the games, with 17 and 14 TV spots, respectively.
Dive Insight:
The Olympics were once largely the domain of traditional TV, but those days are gone. The vast majority of the brands that ran TV ads during the games also ran digital campaigns to complement them.
The shift comes as digital live streaming of the games and second screen activities while watching them have become increasingly popular. TV ratings took a hit as a result, with NBC reporting that it saw a 21% decline in the prime-time TV viewership of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games compared to the 2012 London Games. The household rating was 14.5, a 17% drop from the London Olympics' 17.5 rating — and less than the high teens rating promised to advertisers.
However, NBC's range of streaming video options reached almost 50 million viewers — more than half of which was under 35 years old. Knowing that live streaming video was a popular option, particularly with the desired Millennial and Gen Z audience, will likely influence how marketers approach advertising for future appointment viewing events — like the Olympics — that provide both TV and live streaming video options for viewers.
