To know John Miller — currently chief marketing officer, NBC Olympics — is apparently to ask him to lead whatever marketing operation you’re currently running. His story of constantly falling upward is one for which anyone new to this business of television marketing (or any business, really) should take heed. He wasn’t just in the right place at the right time — he had the right attitude and he made the right decisions, over and over again.

For a career full of right decisions, most of them for NBC, PromaxBDA is giving John D. Miller its Lifetime Achievement Award. This award goes on a shelf with the many other awards Miller has won, including being inducted into the Promax Hall of Fame in 1991, being named Promax’s Marketing Team of the Year along with his NBC Agency co-president Vince Manze in 1995, and being named Promotion Executive of the Year in 1996.

In 1999, Miller, Manze and their colleagues at the NBC Agency won a Primetime Emmy for outstanding commercial. PromaxBDA honored Miller with a Campaigns of Distinction Award in 2006 and 2007. He’s been named Entertainment Marketer of the Year four times, and was named Sports Marketer of the Year by Cynopsis in 2012 and 2013.

Miller launched what was to become that storied career as a freelance producer in 1972, moving to a full-time job in the promotions department at NBC-owned WMAQ Chicago in 1973. Less than two years later, the person who was doing on-air promotions for the station left, and Miller was asked to fill in while the station looked for a replacement. A month later, the station’s general manager asked Miller if he wanted to just keep doing the job, which of course he did. That was in 1975, also the year Miller attended his first of many then Promax—now PromaxBDA—conventions.

Pretty soon, Miller was hired away by the competing CBS station in town, WBBM, and not long after that, CBS wooed him to Los Angeles to become director of affiliate promotion services. Less than a year and a half later, in 1981, he moved again to New York to become director of advertising and promotion for CBS News, just as Walter Cronkite was leaving and Dan Rather was moving into the anchor seat.

Thirteen months later, in August 1982, it was back to Los Angeles to serve as vice president, affiliate promotion services, West Coast, for NBC. His rapid rise did not slow at his new network — he was promoted six times between 1982 and 1993. In 1993, he was named NBC’s executive vice president, advertising and promotion, where he stayed for six years, working with the likes of Brandon Tartikoff and Warren Littlefield.

In 1999, Miller and his then partner, Vince Manze, changed television promotion and marketing as it was then known, and founded the NBC Agency, the industry’s first full-service agency, serving all the networks of NBC, and other areas, such as the dotcom businesses that NBC acquired. During that time, Miller and Manze oversaw such ground-breaking campaigns as “Must See TV,” and promoted such iconic series as Cheers, Friends, Seinfeld and ER.

The 2000s have been a fast-moving time for everyone, and with NBC’s merger with Universal and then Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal, the company soon outgrew the agency. Networks went back to handling their own marketing, and Miller decided it was time again for a change.

“Having run marketing for the TV network for 25 years, I felt it was time to hand over the reins to someone else,” says Miller. “Adam Stotsky [now president of Comcast-owned E!] came in as head of marketing for the entertainment division and I was getting ready to leave and do something else.”

But Comcast’s new management found it difficult to let go of Miller. “[NBCUniversal CEO and President] Steve Burke asked if there was something else I would be interested in sticking around for. Dick Ebersol [then chairman of NBC Sports] said NBC was about to get two full-time sports networks, and the Olympics, maybe you can help market the Summer Olympics in London.

“A couple of years became a few more and a few more and I’m still here,” he says, noting that 2018 is now his “wrap date,” taking him through this year’s Summer Olympics in Rio and the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. But so far Miller has shown himself to be good everything he tries his hand at except for saying no.

What keeps Miller in the game is that even after 44 years, he’s still constantly learning.

“Quite honestly, it’s that reinvention of the media world every year that has made it interesting to me,” he says. “It’s like a different job every year.”

The Olympics — in whatever year the games are being held — are always a good place to catch up on the cutting edge in television marketing.

The Summer Olympics in London in 2012 was the first time that social media really exploded around the Olympic Games, and Rio is expected to eclipse that by an order of magnitude. To cover all NBCUniversal’s bases headed into the games, Miller created an eight-tier campaign. And to get a head-start on creating marketing materials, NBCUniversal brought in some 100 athletes from Team America for five days of shooting in West Hollywood to capture content about them in a variety of ways, from profiles to lifestyle pieces to half-hour shows.

The eight tiers of Miller’s Rio campaign are:

— First and foremost, NBC itself. A network’s own air is still the best place to promote itself: “NBC is still largely where the Olympics will reside, even though we present the Games on 11 different channels,” Miller says.

— NBC affiliates: “Most athletes have a local connection and we try to exploit that.”

— Traditional distribution partners, such as MVPDs, cable companies, satellite companies, and telcos.

— Streaming services such as Apple TV and Roku: “We will stream almost all of the Olympics this year, and we provide marketing materials to all of those services. We want to let people know that the Olympics are available on those platforms. The biggest one of those is Comcast, which happens to be our owner,” he says.

— Out-of-home, in places such as big-box retailers, gas stations, health clubs, college campuses, super markets, quick service restaurants, malls, elevators, bars and taxicabs: “On every place-based media where we can put Olympics content we do. There are rather large networks we work with to do that, and they get well over one billion views per month.”

— NBC’s own advertising network, Symphony, which is another area where Miller leads NBC’s marketing and promotional efforts: “It takes the full breadth of the company to support the Olympics,” he says.

— Social: “The tier that is now the biggest that barely existed in London is social. We’re partnering with BuzzFeed (in which NBC recently invested) to create material for digital properties ourselves.”

NBC also is partnering with such platforms as Snapchat and Spotify on Olympics promotions and more are coming up all the time. With the speed of social media, NBC will likely be signing deals with social platforms up to the start of the Games on August 5.

Just to provide a little perspective: in 2010 when the Winter Olympics were held in Vancouver, the tablet didn’t exist. In 2012, when the London Summer Olympics took place, tablet penetration was about 15 percent, although NBCOlympics.com still saw some 2 billion page views. This year, 4,500 hours of the Olympics will be streamed live for people to consume on their mobile devices, smart phones and tablets.

“This is why all television marketing has changed so much,” Miller says. “In London, we saw a 35 percent increase in kids and a 25 percent increase in teens and mostly we felt that was because the Games were available on a device that is basically attached to them. It provided them a mechanism to watch the Games whenever they wanted. And tweens and older kids are at an age where social communication is part of their lifeblood. They want to see it and chat and talk about it at the very same time. The social part of the Olympics is really something we dive into in a very significant way.”

— And finally, the eighth tier, paid media, on which NBC spends a “surprisingly low” amount of money: “We do it at the very end and it’s to let people to know that the opening ceremony begins on Friday, August 5.”

Even with all of that amazing work behind him, one of the things Miller says he’s proudest of is mentoring people, many of whom have gone on to own their own agencies.

“These are talented people who had leadership skills,” Miller says. “Many of them have been successful and I humbly say they’ve given me some credit for that. From a legacy standpoint, having the people who have worked for you go off to great success, that gives me a tremendous amount of satisfaction.”

Some of these mentees also appear to be satisfied with the results of that arrangement.

“Fortunately, John mentored me early on, giving me my first big breaks for which I wasn’t really qualified,” says Chris Sloan, owner, chief creative officer, 2C Creative in an email. “His feeling was that he should promote people who were passionate and that they would rise to the occasion even if they weren’t quite ready on paper.

“When he blessed my promotion to run NBC-2000 under Jeff Rowe and Vince Manze, he taught me the value of being an entrepreneur within a bigger organization and that relationships and reputations matter. He led by example with class and humility. Even in a competitive place as NBC was during those early days, he reminded us it was about the team more then the individual. I learned a great deal about the business from John, but I even learned more about life from him. Though his Chicago Bulls analogies often went well over my head.”

“When I was a newbie promo producer at NBC, I produced my share of stinkers,” says Stu Weiss, owner/chief creative officer, Studio City, also via email. “The scene would replay like a classic Broadway show in it’s 400th performance. I’d walk into John Miller’s office with a rough-cut, pop it into his 3/4” deck (for those of you too young to know what that means, it’s not some crass Mark Rubio slight) he’d watch it, and the pressure of looming deadlines being what they were, he probably wanted to just explode… but never did.

“He would bring his two hands to his face, position the upper halves of his middle fingers onto the bridge of his nose, rub vigorously up and down (I counted 10 times once) and say, ‘Ok, here’s what we’re gonna do….’ Thankfully for me, the next words were never, ‘Fire your sorry ass.’ It was always a clear, constructive, strategic redirect that allowed me to leave his office with my dignity in place, and a stronger will to succeed.

“I’ve attempted to channel John’s extraordinary creative guidance with my creative teams, but I just can’t come close to the original. To have been mentored by John Miller, ‘the Father of Promotion,’ is one of the great blessings of my career.”

Likewise, PromaxBDA is honored to give John D. Miller the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s Conference, PromaxBDA’s 60th, in New York City June 14-16. Miller will speak on stage at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, June 14.

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