9 August 2008 - 13:57The Olympics and Social Media

In a recent article Ogilvy’s China digital guru Kaiser Kuo said that said Beijing 2008 is the world’s first web 2.0 Olympics. And he went on to write:

 

There’s ample irony, and for some perhaps a certain poetic justice, in this — that the capital city of a country so infamous for censoring the Internet should be the first to host the Games in the age of Internet video sharing, citizen journalism, social networking, of microblogging, and the myriad online services and tools that have empowered ordinary people. Significantly, Beijing 2008 will also be the first Olympics in which a sizeable percentage, if not an absolute majority, of those in the audience will have in their pockets or purses a device capable of sending text, pictures, and often even video around the world almost instantaneously.

 

Another irony is that all of those devices in peoples’ pockets are provoking huge headaches for mainstream media here in the US.

 

NBC has put slews of material on their Beijing 2008 website, including 2,200 hours of video feeds, and a fine site it is. But NBC still has the idea that it can control information in a wired world. Wrong. Or as The New York Times wrote:

 

NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBC’s technological wall — by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites. In response, NBC sent frantic requests to Web sites, asking them to take down the illicit clips and restrict authorized video to host countries. As the four-hour ceremony progressed, a game of digital whack-a-mole took place. Network executives tried to regulate leaks on the Web and shut down unauthorized video, while viewers deftly traded new links on blogs and on the Twitter site, redirecting one another to coverage from, say, Germany, or a site with a grainy Spanish-language video stream.

 

As people happily post their own videos on YouTube, Google is taking them down as fast as possible. But even if Google comes up with some way to block or instantly remove Olympics videos from YouTube, tech-savvy people will still get the information they want when they want it. And — bonus — by seeking out unique sources for coverage of the games they will have a chance to see the Olympics as a world event instead of the annoyingly US-centric event presented by NBC. As an example of what’s out there, check out some of interesting sources listed in China Web2.0 Review’s piece on the Olympics and social media in China.

 

We do sympathize with NBC, after all they paid $894 million for the exclusive rights to the Olympic broadcast in the United States. They obviously aren’t going to be happy about seeing their scoops scooped by regular folks with video cameras. But it’s time for advertisers and broadcasters to turn to digital advertising for events like the Olympics, because there’s simply no way that brand owners are going to be willing to pay big prices to run their ads on television with the primetime events when realtime-primetime happened 12 hours ago and the video/scores/commentary is already available all over the web. Multichannel advertising across all digital platforms is the way to go.