• by August 16, 2004

MORE FUN THAN A FIVE RING CIRCUS - "One." We felt the butterfly strokes in our stomachs the first few times we saw Michael Phelps touch Liberty Island in the evocative Olympics-themed Visa spot, but after viewing it countless times leading up to and during the Games themselves, we're starting to think the campaign may have swum one lap too many, especially for people who're watching the Games via a digital video recorder. DVR households, as some recent research from InisightExpress has proven, tend to fast-forward through ads they've already seen, but may actually pause or replay ads that are new and novel to them. Given that finding - as well as more traditional research on the wear-out of viewers watching ads on conventional TVs - it's a wonder that advertisers like Visa aren't doing a better job of rotating copy in high-priced events like the Olympics.

Sure, Visa freshened the spot with a voiceover commemorating Phelps' first gold medal win ("Sometimes practices does pay off. Congratulations to gold medallist Michael Phelps."), but who would have noticed that zipping through the spot at triple TiVo speed? We know it's still pretty expensive to produce the high-quality spots of a Visa commercial, but think of the mileage, recall and ad effectiveness that could have been gained if Visa and its shop - BBDO, if we're not mistaken - could have gotten if they'd just shot some extra footage of Phelps swimming around other exotic points around the globe, and scheduling it as a serial campaign in which viewers would look forward to seeing the next place Phelps would pop up?

One place Phelps kept popping up this weekend was on the Riff's TV set, and not because NBC Sports' droning commentary an unimaginative editing of the Athens Games made us that much more rapt in watching the 2004 Games than in watching past televised Olympics. It's really two things that are making the Athens Games that much more enjoyable: 1) The fact that we are viewing them via a TiVo-enabled TV set; and 2) The fact that we have upward of five (make it six if you include Telemundo) NBC-owned channels to choose from. Those are the two Cs - choice and control - that seem to make for the winning equation in any media event, but put them together with the breadth and depth of Olympics-level coverage and you have, well, a gold medal performance.

While it is not exactly the level of control NBC originally pitched as part of its over hyped Olympics TripleCast back in the 1996 Games, NBC's 2004 Olympics SextupleCast still offers the smart, DVR-equipped viewer an unprecedented array of options, switching back and forth from NBC to CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, USA and Telemundo to catch coverage not favored by one of those channels. In fact, while much of America was dipping in the Olympic swimming pool that constituted NBC's coverage, the Riff was glued to early round boxing competition on CNBC and even a breath-taking table tennis match carried by Bravo.

But the best parts of watching the Olympics via TiVo are the ability to program days, even weeks ahead of time, and the ability to fast-forward through much of the mindless chatter of the NBC Sports production to see the events themselves - in slow-mo, pause or instant replay if we choose. Sure, we know that replaying the Olympics through a DVR hard drive takes away all the spontaneity of a live sports event, but the networks have already managed to do that for us a long time ago.