Raise your hand if you watched the American Giving Awards Saturday night.
Didn’t think so.
The program ran on NBC except it wasn’t a program so much as a promo for JPMorgan Chase, which financed and sponsored it. All they needed was a network to present it as legitimate content, which NBC was more than willing to do.
According to the New York Times, when asked if the American Giving Awards was an advertisement, an NBC spokeswoman said, “No. It’s a show about charitable giving.”
But not, apparently, one the network is particularly proud of, since plugging “American Giving Awards” into the NBC.com search box returns this:
The president of the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, which says it doles out $150 million a year, was proud though, calling it a celebration of “ordinary people doing extraordinary things in communities” . . . with the money they got from Chase, of course, which the show mentioned numerous times in addition to the eight 30-second commercials and the multiple “presented by Chase” in-show mentions.
That’s not an advertisement only in MagritteWorld.
Actually, Lisa Graves of PR Watch told the Times, it’s even worse: “[It’s a] ‘greedwashing’ campaign to score P.R. points.” Graves added that the $2 million in donations that were featured on Saturday night “are a drop in the bucket compared to the ultra-lush benefits for bankers who profited richly from the swaps that undermined our nation’s financial security.”
That sweeping enough for everyone?
Then again, the “feel-good holiday season special” didn’t do so good. According to tvbythenumbers.com:
The American Giving Awards drew a microscopic 0.3 adults 18-49 rating and just 1.5 million viewers.
Just? That’s 1.5 million more than it deserved.
Originally posted on the Newer! Improveder! Sneak ADtack!
Campaign Outsider 
There was an American Giving Awards show? Gee, musta missed it. I stopped watching awards shows about the time that the Peoples Choice Award hit the airwaves. And, don’t even get me started about the country music awards shows. Just how many of them are there? Even the big three, Oscars, Emmys, and Tonys are a bit full of themselves.
Actually, especially the big three, Al.
I go to Tvbythenumbers.com every day, and I like to read the comments there. Visitors to the site seem overly eager to excoriate NBC in all its forms, so they oftern get their facts wrong. NBC’s “Today” show and the “NBC Nightly News” are both dominant, and Jay Leno usually outrates the other comedians and occasionally “Nightline”. To read the comments, one would think that NBC’s broadcast network is in the same league as the CW. (One of the Spanish-language broadcast networks actually does better in some dayparts than NBC, ABC or CBS!)