As the broadcast upfront finally gets underway, it appears that NBC and Fox are in the midst of a full-blown ad war over which is a better ad vehicle: NBC’s Winter Olympics or Fox’s Major League Baseball.
    But if media buyers are following the spitting match of words, it doesn't appear they are taking it either seriously or at face value. And that's hardly surprising.
    The tiff has all the authenticity of a professional wrestling match—lots of posturing, little real danger, and everybody gets paid in the end.
    The faux battle commenced earlier this month in what was clearly a case of pre-upfront jousting for media attention.
    Fox led off with a series of print ads touting postseason baseball’s edge over the 2000 Summer Olympics in male demos, viewer income and CPM efficiency.
    The ads, which continue to run this week in the trades, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, use digital editing to depict Yankees and Mets players beating Olympians at their own sports.
    Roger Clemens raises his hands in victory from inside a bobsled. Mike Piazza clears a hurdle with his catcher’s mask in one hand. Al Leiter clings to a pair of Olympic rings, and Derek Jeter, baton in hand, anchors a relay race.
    Nothing subtle here--simply jocks at play cracking wise with big grins so no one misses the point.
   Then last week, not to be out-joshed, NBC responded, running a full-page ad in the national edition of The New York Times. 
    The ad reads: "Below is an extensive list of television events that attract more viewers than the Olympics."
    Below the copy is a vast area of white space.
    Then, below this vast area of white space, the copy quips, "Nothing beats the Olympics."
     NBC is putting on airs suggesting that this is indeed an honest war of words.
     "The Olympics remain network television’s greatest event. We just thought this was an appropriate time to remind people," says a spokesman for NBC Sports.
     But industry observers find the whole thing a little fishy.
     "I think this is a pillow fight. Neither guy is really going to hurt the other," says Neal Pilson, former president of CBS Sports and currently president of Pilson Communications, a sports consulting company based in Westchester, NY.
     "They’re not truly competitors. There isn’t an advertiser or a sponsor anywhere in America who would confuse the two properties or make a decision to buy one property in place of the other."
     In effect, if not in intent, the whole thing probably amounts to a marketing stunt that benefits both sides.
     "It could be that both networks are sly like foxes—no pun intended—and they’re enjoying the controversy that’s ensued. If they’re not enjoying it, they should be, because they’re getting great ancillary value," says Dean Bonham, chairman of Denver-based sports consulting firm the Bonham Group.
     "The net effect of this is that both networks have created millions and millions of dollars in free exposure, and that’s not being lost on sponsors and fans."
    Baseball and the Olympics have little to take from one another—they’re months apart on the calendar, for one thing. True, as the Fox ads claim, the World Series did out-deliver the Summer Games among key male demos, but few advertisers buy the Olympics to reach young men anyway.
     Likewise, buyers have little reason to look to baseball as a vehicle to reach women and families.
     And finally, there is nothing in either ad that should surprise media buyers, who are the explicit targets of both campaigns.
    "Media buyers aren’t going to be influenced by an advertisement. They already know what the audience is for Major League Baseball and what the audience is for the Olympics," says Lynn Kahle, professor of marketing at the University of Oregon.
    The ads might not be entirely paper tigers, says Kahle, but changing media buyers’ minds is probably not their primary intent.
    "I don’t think these ads had conveying scientific truth as their core motivation. But I suppose if it made a couple of media buyers go and look at baseball’s numbers again, Fox could say that the ad served its purpose."
     One theory being whispered around NBC is that Fox is trying to do a run-around on media buyers, the idea being that a marketing director might pick up The Wall Street Journal, see Fox’s ad and wonder why his/her company isn’t in baseball.
    But even that explanation seems a little limp, say observers.
    "That’s probably an incidental benefit. Someone probably thought of that at Fox. Fox has a whole lineup of very clever promotion executives. They constantly do interesting and provocative work," says Pilson.
    "So I think Fox does have a message here, that their male demos are more attractive than was widely thought. This is a kind of cute way to emphasize that, but it has nothing to do with the Olympics."
    In the meantime, both sides might as well fan the flames.
    "If I were Dick Ebersol, I would continue to encourage the controversy and the antagonistic response back and forth between NBC and Fox," says Bonham.
    "I’m not suggesting that both parties aren’t genuine, but it’s interesting. It’s fun. Fox is helping NBC promote the Olympics indirectly. 
     "It’s one of the more interesting things we’ve seen in media in recent months. The only thing I’m surprised about is that both parties haven’t escalated it up a notch yet."

May 22, 2001 © 2001 Media Life

-Gabriel Spitzer is a staff writer for Media Life.

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