NBC.com's Olympic Ads Repeat Ad Nauseam

On first viewing, it’s really cute, that animated Coca-Cola commercial starring a puffin who can’t open his bottle and the kindly polar bear who comes to his rescue. But lately we’ve been fantasizing about plucking the feathers—one by one!—off that smarmy puffin’s wings. It’s not that we hate polar birds; it’s just that we’ve been forced to watch that ad about 100,000 times while using NBC’s otherwise admirable streaming portal, nbcolympics.com. By Sochi’s closing ceremony, cartoon global warming will seem like a happy outcome.

Unlike traditional television broadcasts in which advertisers purchase airtime during commercial breaks, NBC’s online operation accepted ads only from its major sponsors for Olympics coverage. The perverse consequence is that by midway in any given event, we’d endured Coke’s tundra tear-jerker at least a half-dozen times, with few other offerings mixed in between.