Hasta La Creative!

Since the 2016 Summer Olympics wound down Sunday night, NBC’s PR apparatus has been trying to put a brave face on its performance in Rio, but the final ratings data is the stuff of network boss Steve Burke’s nightmares.

Speaking in mid-June during Guggenheim Securities’ sixth annual TMT Symposium, the NBC Universal CEO said that his biggest fear heading into the Olympics was that young people simply wouldn’t show up. “My worry is that that feeling is — you wake up in the morning and you have either hooked America, and you can tell right after the opening ceremony, in the first two or three nights,” Mr. Burke said, in response to a question posed by Guggenheim executive chairman Alan Schwartz. “Either America has fallen in love all over again or they haven’t, and my nightmare is we wake up someday and the ratings are down 20%.”

While Mr. Burke’s nightmare scenario didn’t play out to the letter, the final Nielsen numbers were fairly grim. Through the 17 nights of ceremonies and competition, NBC averaged 26 million viewers and a 14.9 household rating, which marked a 15% decline from the 2012 Summer Games’ draw of 31.1 million viewers and a 17.5 rating. (Rio’s ratings reflect NBC’s Total Audience Delivery, a metric that blends broadcast and cable prime-time deliveries with streaming data.)

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