Exxon in the Red in China

Pigs are flying. Hell is frozen over. Exxon Mobil Corp. lost money.

Well, for a couple of minutes, anyway.

That's because the oil mammoth, which recently celebrated the most-profitable quarter ever for a corporation, was the dominant advertiser during NBC's broadcast of the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. It aired 2 minutes and 30 seconds worth of commercials during the four-hour show on Friday, according to new research from The Nielsen Company.

During those 150 second, Exxon actually managed to spend more than it made. And that's very good news for NBC and its corporate parent, General Electric.

Here's the math: Nielsen Monitor-Plus reports that between 1996 and 2006, the average cost for 30 seconds of commercial air time on during an Olympic broadcast has ranged between $183,600 in 1998 (Nagano, Japan) to $350,000 in both 2002 (Salt Lake City) and 2006 (Torino, Italy).

Exxon, meanwhile, netted a profit on "only" about $90,000 a minute in the second quarter, according to a calculation by The New York Times.

Based on those figures, Exxon spent more than it earned each time NBC aired one of the oil company's image-polishing commercials. It "lost" around $300,000 on each 30-second spot, a total of $1.53 million. That's 17 minutes' worth of profit.

Of course, Exxon sees it differently. The company says its costs -- $884,000 per minute including advertising expenses, for those of you keeping score at home -- before coming out with $90,000 per minute of profit.

Exxon tallies revenue at the rate of about $1 million per minute, and therefore isn't at all crunched by NBC's big bill.

Other top advertisers during the Opening Ceremony included McDonald's and Visa International with two minutes each of ads, and The Coca-Cola Company, Johnson & Johnson, and General Electric, with 90 seconds each.

Only NBC itself outdid Exxon. It promoted itself with 5 minutes and 40 seconds of ads for two of its new fall shows, Kath & Kim and My Own Worst Enemy.

NBC had room to celebrate its schedule: the network said it pulled in more than $1 billion in advertising revenue for the Beijing Games. Including network shows, cable programs, and Web streaming, NBC Universal is broadcasting 3,600 hours of coverage.

Most of that -- $894 million -- will cover the cost of U.S. rights to broadcast the games. NBC is also on the hook for about $100 million in production costs, including maintaining an army of employees in China.

Turns out that $1 billion doesn't go as far as one might think it does.

by Willow Duttge