UA-59049186-1 What's Going On Picks Low-hanging Fruit - Good if it Goes

What’s Going On Picks Low-hanging Fruit

Haven’t done one of these in a while, but Gerry Smith wrote something mind-bogglingly stupid for Bloomberg, so it’s time to bring this back. Olympics ratings are down, and Smith thinks he knows why: those dang millenials.

Back in June, Steve Burke described what he called his Olympics “nightmare.”

“We wake up someday and the ratings are down 20 percent,” the chief executive officer of NBCUniversal said at a conference. “If that happens, my prediction would be that millennials had been in a Facebook bubble or a Snapchat bubble and the Olympics have come, and they didn’t know it.”

No, they definitely knew the Olympics were happening, and since a lot of stuff was on tape delay, they knew who won, too. Then when they did turn on NBC, the coverage of what the network did show sucked. Canada didn’t have this problem. Could it be because, and I’m just spitballing here, they covered events well and showed them live?

To be sure, many sporting events are as big as ever. The Super Bowl in February pulled in 112 million viewers, making it the third most-watched event in TV history. On the other hand, Villanova’s victory over North Carolina in the men’s college basketball championship drew 37 percent fewer viewers than last year’s title game, though that may have had something to do with the fact that, for the first time, the match-up was on a cable channel, not a broadcast network.

Gee, you really think so? What would ever give you that idea?

One issue is that many fans are getting older. The average age over the past decade of National Football League and Major League Baseball viewers has increased by four and seven years, respectively, to 47 and 53, according to Ben Thompson, founder of the blog Stratechery.

The average age of many things is increasing as the baby boomers get older. As long as the boomers live, those averages are likely to continue increasing as people are having fewer kids and having them later in life.

“Sports is less ingrained in the younger demographic,” said Brandon Ross, an analyst at BTIG Research. “It has been replaced by other things like video games and e-sports and Snapchat feeds.”

Brandon, you’re an idiot, too. Younger people are very much into sports. A statement like the one Ross made ignores a massive failure on NBC’s part to understand how people consume media, including sports, in the year 2016. Social media is a huge deal and NBC handled that in just about the worst way possible. 1. A lot of events that would draw major interest were tape delayed, so people could go on Twitter and find out who won. And 2. NBC got Twitter accounts that tweeted out Olympics footage suspended. Social media enhances the sports viewing experience. People tweet to one another during games. People tweet out big plays. More than a few times, if I’m not engaged watching something already, I’ll flip to a game because a bunch of people are tweeting about it. Adam Silver understands this. Why few else do is beyond me. Social media is nothing new and it’s not going away. There is a major opportunity there for sports organizations to advance their brands and they are letting it pass right by.

NBC Sports Chairman Mark Lazarus said the network has a plan to profit from its Olympics investment, by giving people more options. This year, for example, the network put more than 6,000 hours of coverage online and allowed BuzzFeed to run its Olympics Snapchat channel.

A good plan would include not getting Twitter accounts that are effectively advertising for you for free suspended.

This was just about the laziest thing anyone could right upon seeing the ratings for the Olympics. Rather than analyze the situation, look at all relevant factors, and attempt to come up with a solution to prevent similar ratings disappointments in the future, Smith picks the low-hanging fruit and says it’s the fault of millenials, a popular bogeyman for old farts. It appears as though he looked at the data and went “Who’s at fault here? Millenials, probably. I mean everyone hates those guys, right? What with their fancy newfangled smartphones and SnapFace and InstaTwit. Jerks. I hate those guys. I mean, that’s what’s going on here, right? Gotta be. Jerk millenials care about Snappergram more than the Olympics. That’s a good take, right? Right. Yep, I’m gonna yell at that cloud. Journalism’s totally not dead.” Seriously, to write something like this, you have to be dishonest, blind, stupid or some combination of the three.

Twitter: @KSchroeder_312

E-mail: schroeder.giig@gmail.com

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