Citius, Altius, Survey Us – NBCU's Olympic Bid

NBC Universal (NBCU) is to use the forthcoming Beijing Olympics as a unique testing environment for a more rounded measurement of media consumption, covering a wide variety of media.

Quoted on www.msnbc.msn.com , itself a joint venture between NBC and Microsoft, NBCU's President of Research Alan Wurtzel said the 'billion-dollar lab' was 'an extraordinary research opportunity'.

The network is planning a 'TAMI' or total audience measurement index, combining stats from market leader Nielsen Media Research with research by Omniture, Rentrak, Quantcast and California's Integrated Media Measurement.

During the Olympics NBCU will issue a daily TAMI report include measurement of viewing via all its Olympic media - broadcast network, cable channels, NBC's web sites, video-on-demand and mobile programming. The research will include a daily poll of a panel of 500 people to give deeper insights about their media habits; and a separate poll covering the impact of commercials and online ads on consumers, along with product recall.

TAMI will provide standard raw data about viewers, unique online users and time spent on sections of nbcolympics.com.

Wurtzel says this will give a view of how the Internet and other sources complement TV viewing, and may help advertising efforts for the 2010 and 2012 Olympics and persuade advertisers to buy time on newer media such as VOD and cellphone video. He enthuses: 'The Olympics is a singular event because of its scale and because of the number of people who will consume it over 17 days, so it will magnify the use of every platform' and adds: 'Management said to me we have to figure out a way to go beyond Nielsen to measure this stuff.'

Nielsen, which has introduced a number of cross-platform and new media measurement systems and launched new divisions Nielsen Connect, Nielsen Online and Nielsen Mobile to co-ordinate and drive such efforts, points out that it will be 'doing more total measurement for NBC [in Beijing] than in any other Olympics.'

NBCU spent $894m for the broadcasting rights to the Beijing games, considered steep by some commentators given the time difference with the US - but says it should bring in more than $1bn in ad revenue - sold on the basis of 'traditional' Nielsen ratings. The company has scheduled 3,600 hours of Olympics programming on its TV networks and 2,200 hours of streaming video available on www.NBCOlympics.com .

Thanks also to www.nytimes.com and www.wsj.com for some of the above.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.