Michael Phelps may be hogging all the glory, but if NBC’s marketing division had any say in the matter, Greg Daniels would be walking away from the Beijing Games with a gold medal or two of his own.

The executive producer of NBC’s comedy anchor “The Office” has given the Peacock a major promotional coup by supervising the writing and filming of around a half-dozen Olympics-themed promos for the show. While NBC often asks its showrunners to chime in with ideas for promos, Mr. Daniels’ decision to take complete control of the process himself was a pleasant surprise for NBC Universal Chief Marketing Officer John Miller.

“We went to Greg Daniels and said, ‘When you go back into production, we’d love to have ‘The Office’ take on the Olympics,’” Mr. Miller said.

NBC’s marketing gurus submitted some ideas and scripts for promos to Mr. Daniels, figuring he’d offer some tweaks. “They didn’t take our ideas,” Mr. Miller said. “They went into the writers’ room and came out with some brilliant spots.”

Mr. Daniels and his crew have written about eight Olympics promos, Mr. Miller said. The first spot, “Slap Face,” premiered during the Opening Ceremonies. A second, “Centathalon,” premiered at TVWeek.com Aug. 14 and made its NBC debut over the weekend.

Mr. Miller said “Slap Face” has become an instant hit in the blogosphere, with a number of comedy sites and other video aggregators picking up the spot. “It only ran on TV twice, but you’d have thought we had run it 25 times based on the response,” he said.

Exactly how many more of the Mr. Daniels-created spots will run depends on the production schedule for “The Office.”

“The guys are pretty busy producing the show,” said Adam Stotsky, the newly named president of marketing for NBC Entertainment.

That’s one reason NBC has produced a second wave of “Office” spots that have begun rolling out in the last few days. Instead of going for laughs, these ads go for the heartstrings, playing off fans’ emotional attachment to characters and the long wait between the show’s May 15 season finale and next month’s fifth-season premiere.

“We wanted to play off those cliffhangers (in the finale),” Mr. Miller said.

The spots feature an announcer asking if viewers “can’t wait” to see what happens to Jim, Pam, Dwight and other “Office” regulars, and answers, “Neither can we.”

“It recaps the cliffhangers and cues up what will happen next,” Mr. Miller said.

NBC has licensed Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers tune “The Waiting” to serve as the musical theme for the spots.

Mr. Stotsky thinks the song, along with the spots, fits in well with what network TV’s mission is these days.

“The campaign is sort of a mantra for broadcast television,” he said. “We know there’s this pent-up demand for quality scripted TV, and we’re playing on that.”

Don’t expect to see any of the “Office” spots too often during the Olympics. “We try to put a limit of five prime-time airings on any spot,” Mr. Miller said, adding that the strong ratings performance of NBC’s coverage of the Games should give the network’s marketing division some extra promo time heading into the final week of Beijing.

In any case, when it comes to Olympics promos, a little goes a long way.

“In the first four days of the Games, we reached about 55% of all Americans (with promos),” Mr. Miller said. “You don’t need a ton of these spots to be effective. They’re very sticky.”

(Updated: Name correction. 11:25 p.m.)