The Democrats weren’t the only ones blowing minds on Tuesday night. NBC News stole the night, more than doubling its audience from the last midterm election in 2022 while blowing past all of its competitors, as you can see in the chart below.
That this is an especially impressive feat at a time when your average TV news viewer is at an age where they’re already enjoying Medicare For All, goes without saying.
But what’s even more impressive is that the vehicle for NBC’s success seems to be the fact that they doubled down on an Influencer.
Or an Election Night influencer anyway, one Steve Kornacki. (For those of you outside the US, Kornacki’s boyish enthusiasm for the newsroom’s life-sized election night maps has gained him a cult-like following over the years as well as a Saturday Night Live impersonation.)
How it all played out is a case study worth paying attention to.
Why It Matters
It all began when NBC decided to spin off Kornacki’s former home, MSNBC (now MS NOW) as part of the new Versant corporate entity, and Kornacki opted to stay with NBC.
Who actually treated Kornacki like an influencer rather than a relic.
The centerpiece of the strategy was a ten-and-a-half-hour livestream of the “Kornacki Cam” which had Kornacki reading maps and otherwise doing the tricks he’d become known for.
The livestream generated 29 million views across all platforms, including 6.1 million on YouTube alone, where it was the most-watched election livestream.
At its peak, the Kornacki Cam had over 300,000 live concurrent streams and was getting more than twice the number of live streams than any of the other networks’ YouTube feeds.
But that was not the half of it.
NBC also incorporated the Kornacki Cam into Peacock's election-night multiview option, right up there alongside NBC News NOW and a real-time election results board.
For linear viewers, NBC simulcast segments of Kornacki’s livestream on the traditional NBC network broadcast while letting them know that the live stream existed. That created greater synergy between the two experiences as viewers could opt to get different doses of Kornacki.
For those watching on their laptops, NBC made both the livestream of the NBC broadcast and the Kornacki Cam available on their website. Which led to a significant increase in traffic for NBCNews.com—page views were up 247% and unique visitors were up 141% from the 2022 midterms.
All of those tactics worked in synergy to make NBC the place to be on Election Night.
NBC also made some smart tactical moves.
They did not try and change who Kornacki is, give him a glow up, or provide him with Instagram-friendly memes and graphics.
They just let Steve be Steve and viewers seemed to appreciate that.
It’s called “knowing your audience” and while once an important skill in the industry it seems to have fallen by the wayside as everyone chases “relevance” like some modern-day Holy Grail.
But mostly they did not view YouTube as a competitor who’d steal viewers from them, but rather as a complementary service whose viewers were not making an either/or decision between YouTube and NBC, a service they could then put into action to help grow their overall NBC Election Night audience.
SIDENOTE: As noted in our new Special Report, The State Of CTV Advertising, there is no way to actually compare viewing on YouTube to viewing on streaming and no way to actually compare either of those to linear.
The measurement systems involved are not the same: YouTube and digital video are measured by views, the definition of which varies tremendously from platform to platform, but there’s no guesswork or estimation involved.
TV is measured by Nielsen and other ratings sources that sample the viewership, either via panels or via ACR, and project from there.
Which means the answer to a very basic question “Where did most people go on Election Night to see results?” is unanswerable because there is no 1:1 measurement standard.
Which is why we are in the mess we’re in.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are NBC, take a bow. And then another one.
You have learned the lessons of the Feudal Media economy well and used streaming, broadcast and digital to unite all of the bubbles and create your Peacock Tsunami that made you top dog across all your various touchpoints.
Having a Steve Kornacki helps, but knowing what to do with him is another story and you deserve much credit for that.
If you are one of the other networks, you are not going to create an influencer overnight, but there are steps you can take to create synergy between your various entry points—website, TV, streaming, YouTube—and you want to make sure you are taking full advantage of that.
The good news is you have two full years to get your act together before the presidential election, and much may change by then too.
Stay on top of it though.
This is your Super Bowl, Oscars, MTV VMAs and Emmys all rolled into one.
Don’t blow it.