Nearly two months after its Legendary February, NBC Sports is still digesting all the accomplishments from the 17 days of sports coverage featuring Super Bowl LX, the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, and NBA All-Star Weekend.
During Tuesday’s program at ADWEEK’s Social Media Week, Justin Karp, vp of social media at NBC Sports, spoke engagingly on the Main Stage about the lessons his team learned from one of the events NBC covered during Legendary February: the Winter Olympics.
“Our mantra all Games long was that our target audience was anybody with a smartphone,” said Karp.
He spoke about how their executive and marketing leadership group empowered them to do things differently, telling them to tear up the playbook and find new, fresh, and engaging ways to connect with long-time and new fans of the Olympics.
“Start the conversation, lead the conversation, and keep it going 24-7,” Karp added.
With events airing live during the day, NBC decided to treat the 8 p.m. ET recap like a feature film. This gave Karp and his team the ability to treat the Olympics not only as a sporting event, but as a cultural event, finding relatable content that could build enough enthusiasm to keep people going all the time.
“Our social content strategy complemented the competition through context, celebrity, culture,” Karp said. He added that this strategy enabled his team to turn incredible moments into a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week stream of fandom.
Their work revolved around three pillars during the two-week event: the first being that the Olympics are the pinnacle of competition, and you should be watching it. Second, the Olympics are fun, and their content and strategy should reflect that. Finally, the Olympics are a cultural moment that just happens to be sports, which means bringing in as many people as possible so that they can be part of the moment.
Despite being one of the final sessions of the day, Karp had a nearly full room, with an attentive audience eager to hear about the three insights his social media team gained after the Olympics:
NBC’s three social insights include:
- Everything published could be someone’s first exposure to your brand. It needs to be engaging enough to capture the audience.
- Don’t get caught off guard by a predictable event. Prepare in advance and respond quickly to all expected outcomes.
- Give your creators the guardrails, letting them know the boundaries within which they can operate, and then let them fly.
Karp concluded his session, noting that the company has already moved on to the next big thing: There are 833 days until the opening ceremony of the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
