Peacock Hit It Big With the Summer Olympics. Heres How Its Using That Momentum to Boost

July 2024 · 6 minute read

Steph Curry left Paris with an Olympic gold medal — and a rising comedy on Peacock to boot. The streamer is taking advantage of this month’s Olympics momentum to launch new and returning series over the next several weeks, and already shows like Curry’s “Mr. Throwback” have benefited from that lift.

“Mr. Throwback” debuted Aug. 8, just as Curry helped land a first-place finish for the U.S. basketball team (which defeated France in the Olympics men’s final). According to the streamer, approximately 77% of “Mr. Throwback” viewers had watched Olympics basketball — and presumably were swayed by the show’s promos that ran throughout the games.

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“The Olympics are a great opportunity to bring in a big new audience and introduce them to what Peacock does not just in sports, but in entertainment,” says Peacock chief marketing officer Shannon Willett. That strategy started early with the launch of Roland Emmerich’s gladiator drama “Those About to Die,” which launched July 18 — right before the Games. Once the Olympics began, viewers discovered “Die” in droves.

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“We built a marketing campaign that ties it to the Olympics,” Willett says. “These are like the original Olympic sports, when you think about gladiator competitions.”

As a result, Willett says about 60% of the show’s audience also tuned in to the Games, while 16% to 18% of Olympics viewers watching events like wrestling or boxing then switched to “Those About to Die.” “We’re seeing overlap in the sports that make the most sense.”

Peacock also used the July 26 opening ceremony to then auto-play viewers into “Kung Fu Panda 4,” which had been added to the streamer a month earlier.

“With that family-friendly, big, broad moment, we were thinking about how we launch really big entertainment content,” Willett says. “We have so much content to show them. And so it’s about really trying to understand who are they and what are they going to enjoy on the platform — and how do we best surface that for them.”

According to the subscription-tracking service Antenna, Peacock added around 2.8 million new subscribers during the first week of the Olympics. That provided Willett and her team to target a large base of new potential viewers for the streamer’s regular series.

In harnessing the Olympics to drive attention to Peacock’s entertainment fare, Willett patterned the strategy on what Peacock experienced in January when it ran an exclusive NFL wild card game. That telecast became the biggest live-streamed event in U.S. history, reaching nearly 28 million viewers. Peacock seized on that influx of audience to launch the comedy “Ted” and solidify the success of “The Traitors,” which had just returned for Season 2.

“The day after that wild card game was the biggest day in Peacock history for on-demand viewing of entertainment content,” Willett notes. “What we have to look at is making sure that we’re putting those right shows in front of people. There may be fans that are coming on to watch the Olympics that have never experienced Peacock before, and they don’t know what other content we have. This is our opportunity to showcase that to them and hopefully get them to stay around after the Olympics.”

Besides “Those About to Die” and “Kung Fu Panda 4,” the two standout programs that Peacock users gravitated toward during the Games were “Love Island” and “Below Deck Mediterranean.”

Beyond the premiere of “Mr. Throwback,” upcoming priority launches that got plenty of Olympics promo time included the Season 3 return of “Bel-Air,” the new Kevin Hart-Taraji P. Henson series “Fight Night” and the Eddie Redmayne-starrer “Day of the Jackal.”

For “Bel-Air” showrunner Carla Banks-Waddles, the Olympics bump couldn’t have come at a better time. Due to the Hollywood strikes, “Bel-Air” hasn’t been back on TV for a year and a half, so those spots during the Games — not to mention shots during the events of star Jabari Banks, who had traveled to Paris — definitely helped bolster the show’s awareness.

And because one of the series’ characters is a swimmer, Banks-Waddles even incorporated a bit of an Olympics storyline into this season (which takes place during the summer).

“It really gave us a boost of confidence knowing that we were going to have that kind of support and marketing promotion for the show,” she says.

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