CBS Wins a Medal in Olympic Ratings

CBS closed out its Albertville coverage as perhaps the biggest overachiever of the Winter Olympics, posting a solid prime-time ratings average of 18.7, well above its 17.0 guarantee to advertisers and within hailing distance of the 19.3 score that ABC posted at Calgary in 1988.

Against predictions that CBS would lose a bundle on the Olympics, Howard Stringer, president of the CBS Broadcast Group, said the network broke even financially, but he provided no specifics.

The ratings, along with a high audience share of 29, indicated that CBS was pulling viewers away from cable TV and from non-TV activities--something that has been increasingly hard for the networks to do.

NBC, which will carry the Summer Olympics from Barcelona, should be heartened by the CBS numbers, experts said.

To complaints of too many commercials and too little action, CBS replied, in essence: You can’t argue with the numbers.

Yet some critics insisted on doing so.

“The ratings mean the set is on and there are people in the room,” said Gene DeWitt, president of DeWitt Media, a New York City-based advertising buyer. “But what we pay for with the Olympics is rapt attention and a level of intensity that was not there this time.”

DeWitt criticized the CBS shows for “soft news and puffery.” He said the studio commentary of announcers Paula Zahn and Tim McCarver was the equivalent of easy-listening music in that it allowed viewers to “walk around the room” rather than sit engrossed in front of the tube.

Although DeWitt’s opinion was shared by numerous TV critics, it seemed to be a minority view in the advertising community.

“The bottom line is they attracted and held the viewership of the country to a much greater extent than advertisers--or even CBS--expected,” said Steve Grubbs, senior vice president of BBDO Worldwide advertising in New York.

Grubbs and others found that remarkable because of several problems CBS faced with the Albertville Olympics:

--The time difference meant that nearly all the action had to be shown on tape delay.

--The end of the Cold War had robbed the event of the East-West rivalry that lent drama in earlier years.

--As usual, U.S. athletes weren’t expected to perform well in the winter sports.

CBS executives repeated a comment they have made throughout the Games to describe their strategy. They treated the Olympics not as sport, but as entertainment.

“The most important critics are the viewers,” said George F. Schweitzer, a senior vice president of CBS, “and they came, and they stayed through the night in numbers that grew through each broadcast.”

The NBC spokesman called the rival network’s Olympics ratings “tremendous” and “a great sign for everybody involved in the business.”

Since each ratings point represents 921,000 homes today, versus 886,000 in 1988, CBS could claim a slightly larger average audience--17.2 million--than that won by ABC’s Calgary coverage, despite CBS’ lower ratings.

For the week that ended Sunday, Feb. 23, CBS gained first-place Neilsen ratings for six of seven nights of prime time. Among the week’s highest-rated programs, the Olympics took three of the top five spots and six of the top 20.

The week’s top-rated show was Friday night’s Olympics broadcast, with a 25.0 rating and 40 share. That show featured the U.S. hockey team’s defeat at the hands of the Unified Team (formerly the Soviets) and American Kristi Yamaguchi’s gold-medal performance in figure skating.

The rating is the percentage of televisions in the United States, and the share is the percentage of sets in use.

CBS spent $243 million on the rights to the Winter Olympics and a reported $70 million more in production costs. That meant a total outlay of $313 million.

If the network’s asking price of $250,000 per 30-second commercial held firm--a big if--then it may have grossed $262.5 million in ad revenues over the 50 hours of prime-time programming. CBS said it ran 10 1/2 minutes of commercials per hour.

The difference between the $313 million outlay and the $262.5 ad revenue was not addressed directly by CBS officials in making their assessment that the network broke even on this event.

The network had to scramble to sell out its Olympics ad slots by the time the Games began and reportedly had to discount some of its ad sales.

“I think the lesson for NBC is it better not wait till the last minute to sell it out,” DeWitt said. “I don’t see the media-buying market heating up at all.”