For much of the world, the Olympic Games are equivalent to that of a Public Trust, imbued with unique rights for its audience. So it comes as no surprise that NBC viewers of the Closing Ceremony of the London 2012 games felt like sacrificial lambs when 52 prolific minutes of iconic British rock were replaced with a full commercial-free hour promo of the network's new Fall sitcom series Animal Practice-featuring a veterinarian who hates people, loves animals.
By cannibalizing the historic musical artistry of Kate Bush, Ray Davies, Muse and The Who for its Sunday night family viewing audience, NBC did little to curry favor for one of its new and upcoming family programs. Rather than please its loyal viewers, the Peacock network added insult to injury for its already lambasted tape-delayed programming of the Olympic Games (noted in the social media response last week analyzed in this blog). In what appears a desperate move to bolster its protracted beleaguered ratings-albeit temporarily lifted by the Olympics coverage-NBC corporate suits opted to suspend viewer reality with what I would call Animal Malpractice. At best, the TV network's VOC myopia undermines the value of customer loyalty, especially in a highly competitive market. At worst, it further feeds the appetite of potential cable-cutters.
So much for cultivating its viewership, as the ire of these social posts sum up well:
Who needs some of the greatest performers of British history to watch when we have bad comedy? Thank you @NBC, for #AnimalPractice.
Olympics r over..now I can stop watching NBC for another 4 years lol.
Just close them already. I hate NBC's monopoly of the Olympics.
While there may have been 31+ million sets of eyeballs on Sunday night's Closing Ceremony, in a 24-hour period there also were some 7,300 viewing audience posts that generated 15.3 million impressions preponderantly critical of NBC's broadcast decision to cut the talents of legendary British rock music from the program, analyzed in the NetBase summary below.
As the Animal Practice promo began to encroach on the performances of the Closing Ceremony's rock stars Sunday night at 10:00 p.m. EST, social Net Sentiment was at 19%, with Passion Intensity soaring to 96-plummeting 24 hours later to -14% with Passion Intensity at 57, still reflecting heated VOC discussion. The 24 hour average is -5% Sentiment and 52 Passion Score.
Our social analysis of viewer behavior for the Closing Ceremony indicated nearly 65% split intent to either "not watch," "cut out," or "halt" viewing, as compared to those who would continue to view the program. This corresponds significantly to the 24-hour Passion Intensity low of -57%, which reflects highly emotive or piqued VOC on both sides of the debate and expresses the ratio of strong emotions, both positive and negative, to all emotions expressed about a topic.
Reflecting the emotional temperature of the programming debate, audience emotion-when filtered for Animal Practice within the Olympics Closing Ceremony word cloud below-expresses more than "chagrin." It actually appears more like "anger," outrage," "disgust," and "disgrace," with an NBC audience who also seemed to play "hostage" to "the only game in town" during the Olympic Games.
NBC's early Animal Practice social intelligence stats are in. Sunday night's Closing Ceremony promo showed -58% Net Sentiment, 50 Passion Intensity, with the past month averaging -12% Sentiment, 82 Passion Intensity out of 1500 posts. Top emotions for the sitcom are shown in the word cloud below:
As for the new Fall sitcom's prospects for success, the early social salvo hasn't been pretty. As reflected in the below posts, NBC may be suffering from Social Malpractice 101.
Those who see and respect animals for what they are, and who don't see animals as some kind of weird, morphed humanoids will probably not care for 'Animal Practice,' and will quickly abandon NBC to watch Animal Planet or volunteer at an animal shelter.
Wow, Animal Practice on NBC is terrible. They should tape delay it[Animal Practice] until 2 or 3am. I think my favorite actor is the monkey.
Can't wait to see the numbers on this. Ought to be hilarious how many viewers Animal Practice loses from the Closing Ceremony lead-in.
We get commercial-free Animal Practice after commercial-laden Closing Ceremony. It's nice that we have our cultural priorities straight.
Another true factor to consider overall in monitoring audience agitation, or acceptance, is that NBC viewers have disengaged from the network to express their opinions-almost 60% on Twitter and 30% on Facebook. Not idle critics, these perturbed NBC viewers are impassioned media consumers now challenging the status quo in micro blogs (35%), blogs (23%) and other social networks (17.5%). Whether these viewers are in the minority now or not, they represent the pitch and crescendo of network dissonance that cannot be dismissed. To the contrary, their discontent is symptomatic of growing cable network viewer fatigue, where audiences have growing media options.