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Facebook campaign at centre of network stoush

An employee at media buyer MEC is at the centre of a network stoush because of a Facebook page, Channel 9's Olympic Coverage Sucks.

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An employee at media buyer MEC is at the centre of a network stoush between Seven and Nine because he is linked to the Facebook page, Channel 9’s Olympic Coverage Sucks.

MEC Adelaide managing director Peter Bucklow confirmed action would be taken against digital analyst Isaac O’Leary.

“We’ll take appropriate action because we have very strong policies right throughout our company about the use of social media,” Mr Bucklow told News Ltd. “This particular person did something that was not appropriate and not sanctioned by us and not supported by us. Channel 9, all the TV networks, are people we have to deal with every day.”

But he denied it was linked Seven, despite sister agency Mediacom having an exclusive contract with Seven.

Nine spokesman David Hurley told the Sunday Telegraph there was clear cause for suspicion.

“Seven has engaged in the longest dummy spit in media history about not being the 2012 rights holder, and in recent weeks has conducted its own negative campaign to talk down just about everything about London.”

A Seven spokesperson added, “Nine’s claims that we are somehow linked to a social media campaign via someone who is on a Twitter account and Facebook is hilarious.”

O’Leary claims the Facebook page belongs to his friend.

The page has over 27,000 “Likes” and plenty of people also talking about Nine deleting their comments.

Of course the media attention will now see the site become even more popular. Lucky the thing is nearly over.

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  2. @Timbo You can’t compare these Olympics with the last one. Beijing is in the same time zone, more or less, meaning all the evening finals fell in Australian prime time. The last Olympics with a comparable time difference to London was Athens in 2004. Ratings for London are up almost 10 per cent on the Athens numbers.

  4. @Dave – I can’t comment on whether people at Channel/Network Nine care (altho’ I suspect that they do) but the ratings aren’t exactly stellar and Nine didn’t sell as much as advertising as it expected / needed to break even.

    I realise that comparing ratings numbers now with 4 years ago is not straightforward because of the additional channels, but Seven averaged over 2 million during prime-time of the second week of the Beijing Games, whereas Nine have been getting around 1.7m. Seven’s news monstered Nine’s last time too, while this Olympics they’re more even despite Nine’s recent resurgence in Sydney and Melbourne.

  5. The page has got nearly half as many likes in a week-and-a-bit as Channel Nine have since they created their page, and a lot of those (on Nine’s FB) will be people thinking that they have to ‘like’ something before commenting.

    I don’t know whether anyone at the Seven Network has had anything to do with this but David Hurley is being thoroughly disingenuous in complaining about Seven talking down the Olympics. That is a tactic that was invented by, and is regularly used by, ACA to denigrate popular programs on other channels (that they did this ten years ago with Big Brother is hugely ironic).

    Lastly, Isaac O’Leary was a bit a fool to claim on-line to be the “secret face” of this campaign and not expect that his employer.would find out and take action.

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