The karaoke bar in Southeast had the Olympics on Tuesday with the sound off, while a man in a Blazers jersey worked his way through Africa. The host, who calls everyone baby, kept looking past him at the screen. Not at the swimming. At Snoop Dogg, in a plaid three piece suit, at the horses.
Half the bar was watching a muted broadcast because of one correspondent. There is no line item for that.
NBC is reported to have paid him somewhere around half a million dollars a day. Every official sponsor of these Games paid considerably more than that for considerably less conversation.
NBC did not buy a celebrity endorsement. It bought a point of view, which is the only asset in this entire Olympic media market that no sponsor can replicate with money.
Look at the sponsor work running alongside him. Slow piano. Sunrise training montage. A voiceover about the years nobody sees. Athlete overcomes the thing. Logo. I could name six of these spots and you could not tell me which brand belonged to which, and I have sat in the rooms where they get approved, so I know exactly how they end up identical. Everyone bought the same package and then filled it with the same footage.
Snoop is not a package. He carried the torch through Saint Denis and looked genuinely thrilled about it. He learned dressage vocabulary on air and used it wrong on purpose and then used it right. He turns up at events nobody was going to watch and makes them the events people watch.
The reason it works is not that he is famous. Plenty of famous people have hosted Olympic coverage into a void. It works because he is actually delighted, and delight cannot be scripted into a media plan after the fact.
Which is the part brands keep getting backwards. Duolingo did not buy reach and then approve the owl through legal. Liquid Death did not test its way into a name that sounds like a threat. Oatly put the weird copy on the carton first and figured out distribution second. In every case somebody with a genuine voice was given room to move, and the media buy came after.
What most brands do instead is purchase enormous reach and then script the reach until it sounds like the last thing that tested well. You pay for a personality and then sand off the personality. Then you wonder why the recall numbers are flat.
You pay for a personality and then sand off the personality.
Back at the bar, the host took the mic between singers and said the horses were dancing better than anybody here, baby. Got the biggest laugh of the night. Also unscripted. Also, I suspect, the whole lesson.