A bit late, but I was overseas and caught most of the Olympic hype in back issues of the papers.
How credulous are Americans to buy into the Nike-fueled “Bode” silliness? “The bad boy of skiing!” First, that’s kind of a contradiction in terms. Second, his “bad boyness” consists, AFAICT, of skiing with a hangover. Oooh!!! Third, he’s came in about sixty-fourth. Fourth, Americans don’t give a rat’s ass about competitive skiing as a sport, so why would they be duped into caring who the “bad boy” of a sport they consider irrelevant is? Who’s the bad boy of cribbage?
Didn’t people fall for the same thing with Alberto Tomba?
The NBC ads seem to have taken the same tack, showing a variety of greasy-lank-haired characters against a black background, looking menacing as all get out, but for the fact that they are . . . speed skaters.
There’s little doubt in my mind that this stuff is not 99%, but 100%, the result of marketing imperatives by the network and the advertisers. They’re faced with the paradox that they have tried to sell the Olympics as some sort of pinnacle of sports, but it consists mostly of sports, and athletes, that Americans spend four solid years completely ignoring, so they need to gin up “personalities” and “dramas” and storylines. But why would anyone buy this, for a moment? I don’t know who “Bode” is, nor was there the slightest chance I would come to care. Did anyone?
The corollary to my theory that I’m not going to reward ham-handed attempts to create “personalities” is that one is morally obligated to laugh, out loud and repeatedly, whenever an ad campaign tries to evoke intimidation or machodom as to a perfectly fine, but non-macho, sport. I remember the billboards referring to Lance Armstrong as “The Cyclysm.” Scary stuff – watch out, or he’ll pass you on the hill in his yellow shirt!
They’re kind of programmed to think that way. As far back as I can remember (never you mind) the Olympics always had that kind of gimmick. Okay, it was Mark Spitz, when I was six. Then Olga Corbut, Franz Klammer, Nadia Comeneicu, Bruce Jenner, The Hockey Team, Carl Lewis, Mary Lou Retton etc etc etc. You’ll notice that it was only early on that we had foreigners as the “stars” of the olympics. The Marketing Department for the USOC decided it was alot easier to play up an American, no matter what sport he was in, than a foreigner. Anyway, that’s the model they stick to, even when it blows up in their faces (remember the deacthletes?).
I thought they missed an opportunity with the cross-country skiing. They already had a drama going, and they could have played it up as “Norwegian NASCAR.” Hell, it was worth a shot.
Hype or no, silly race-costing flip or no, I would still like to give Lindsey Jacobellis ten dozen roses and as many applications of warm sex wax as she will lie still for.
I got mighty sick of hearing all the fuss about Apolo Anton Ohno, or whatever his name is, based largey (as far as I could tell) from his having a cool-sounding name.
One of the many reasons I root only for foreign teams in the Olympics.
The more people know the athletes involved, the higher the ratings. So it makes sense to hype athletes from a network point of view. Even if Bode Miller gets skunked, millions of people tune in to see him.
For ads, it’s a solid gamble. If the star makes it big, then the ads do well, especially if you pick them before the games. It also makes people watch your star and thus the ads you run during the Olympics (I wonder if Nike paid to place more ads when Bode was racing?).
In the past, sponsors and the networks waited until stars emerged during the competition. Now, they try to pick them in advance. Sometimes, it a disaster (Dan O’Brien). Other times, it’s a bonanza (Apollo Ohno). It’s the advertisers who determine who they’ll promote in advance, not the USOC or the network.