NBCUniversal Achieves Record Olympic Ad Spend; Microsoft Beats Revenue Forecast; Spain Hands Booking.com €413M Antitrust Fine

by Aimee Newell Tarín on 1st Aug 2024 in News

On today’s news digest: NBCUniversal Achieves Record Olympic Ad Spend; Microsoft Beats Revenue Forecast; Spain Hands Booking.com €413M Antitrust Fine

Comcast-backed NBCUniversal, which has had US rights to the Olympics for over thirty years, is set to surpass its hefty ad spend expectations for the 2024 Paris games. Total ad revenue for this year’s games is expected to surpass USD$1.25bn (£0.97bn): this figure would set a new record for Olympic ad spend, rising above the $1.2bn (£0.93) spent on the Tokyo games held in 2021. All sporting events are viewable through the Peacock platform, which has been heavily promoted by other NBCU platforms. Peacock has significantly driven ad performance, as well as doubling digital ad revenue compared to Tokyo.

Microsoft also has positive figures to share this week: the tech titan beat its revenue forecast for the latest quarter, revealing a 15% year-over-year increase. However, it marginally missed the predicted revenue target for its Azure cloud computing services, which increased 29% instead of the predicted 30% to 31%. The past couple of weeks have been pretty turbulent for Microsoft, as it found itself at the centre of global tech outages which led to billions of dollars of losses across industries ranging from finance to travel. Microsoft has continued fortifying itself as one of the major players in the AI landscape, through steady investment in OpenAI – although questions have arisen surrounding whether this will eventually yield the revenue boosts hoped for.

Heading over to the EU for the latest in the antitrust ambit, Spain has fined Booking.com a sum of €413.24m (£348.33m). Concluding an investigation into the online travel agency which commenced in 2022, Spain’s competition authority – the CNMC – found that Booking.com has abused its dominant market position over the past five years. The CNMC also confirmed that it imposed unfair commercial conditions on hotels, and that its authority restricted rivals and made it much more difficult for them to compete in the sector. Looking at the figures, this certainly adds up: during the period of investigation, the travel agency held a share fluctuating between 70% to 90% for online booking intermediation services to hotels in Spain.