NEW YORK Over the course of the last week, Beijing's Olympic Park has pulled double-duty, functioning as a proving ground for the world's top athletes and a research laboratory for NBC Universal. And while the XXIX Olympiad has offered a seemingly endless succession of shocking and memorable moments, NBC officials say they aren't at all surprised by what they've discovered on the ratings front.

Speaking to reporters at 2 a.m. Thursday (Beijing time), NBC Olympics president Gary Zenkel said that the 2008 Games have reaffirmed the strength of broadcast television, even in an era of hyper-accelerated fragmentation. If anything, nonlinear platforms seem to have helped build up NBC's Olympics audience, he said.

"The numbers are astounding, and we're fairly certain that multiplatform distribution throughout the day is essentially fueling that interest and driving viewers over to share in the Olympics in prime time," Zenkel said. "People are gathering in front of their TV sets in greater numbers than ever."

Case in point: On Tuesday night, an estimated 40 million viewers tuned in to watch U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps set the all-time record for individual gold medal victories. In aggregate, some 82 million people plugged into the broadcast on the night of the 12th, giving NBC its highest-rated night of Games coverage thus far.

Across all media, the ratings have been even more impressive. Giving the press its first look at NBC's TAMi numbers, NBC Universal research president Alan Wurtzel revealed that on Sunday, some 107.4 million viewers watched Olympics coverage on the broadcast net and the NBCU family of cable channels (USA Network, Bravo, MSNBC, etc.). When Internet, mobile and video-on-demand platforms were thrown into the mix, the number of exposures grew to just north of 113 million, Wurtzel said.

Pulling together proprietary data from the likes of Nielsen Media Research, Omniture (Web) and Rentrak (VOD), TAMi, or the Total Audience Measurement Index, is the culmination of NBC's early efforts to measure all media exposure. Stacking digital data atop the broad base of TV viewership, the resulting pyramid looks a bit like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, with broadcast functioning as the bedrock upon which the rest of the platforms are built. (Narrowing upward with online and mobile usage, the pyramid tapers off at the top with the Games' tiny VOD audience.)

Through Monday, August 11, TV has accounted for slightly less than 94 percent of NBCU's total Olympics audience, and while the digital numbers are relatively small, they are additive. On the day after NBCU's TV numbers hit their high-water mark, some 94.8 million people watched Olympics coverage on the tube. And while linear viewing dropped slightly, office drones looking to get their fix on Monday afternoon helped lift online exposure to 7.81 million uniques, accounting for 7.6 percent of the day's total.

Monday night's 4x100 freestyle relay, which saw Jason Lezak secure victory for the U.S. men's swim team over a mouthy French squad, has been NBC's most-viewed online video from the Beijing Games thus far, according to Wurtzel. The race was watched on NBC by a live audience of 81 million people; another 1.7 million accessed the race via online video.

Wurtzel said that the relay was particularly interesting in light of how many people elected to share the video with friends. Some 1.5 million streams were shared, which speaks to the power of the Olympics as a community event.



Perhaps the most instructive finding brought to light by the TAMi numbers is that NBCU's decision to restrict live Web footage seems to have been the right call. On the one hand, the limitation kept viewers locked in on NBC, which is where the lion's share of the ad dollars live. Thus, there was no cannibalization of the Peacock's linear audience.

At the same time, the online offering was still robust enough to drive record Web traffic. Over the course of the first four days of the 2008 Games, NBCOlympics.com garnered 291 million page views and serve up 13.5 video streams. By comparison, NBC's previous high-water mark for online visits came on June 16, when Tiger Woods defeated Rocco Mediate in an 18-hole sudden-death playoff, winning the U.S. Open and notching 9.1 million page views and 1.5 million streams.

That said, Wurtzel was quick to reiterate NBCU's overarching message for the day, which is that broadcast TV is still the 800-pound gorilla in the media mix. "Television is the mother ship," Wurtzel said. "In spite of the fact that it's a three-platform world, we should never forget that the broadcast network alone is still a very powerful medium."

Perhaps most importantly, NBCU's advertisers are enjoying a gold-medal run that rivals that of Phelps. Wurtzel said that Nielsen IAG research data demonstrates that Olympic viewers are thoroughly engaged, so much so that brand recall is up as much as 85 percent for spots that run during the Games, versus regular prime-time programming. Moreover, likeability is about 80 percent higher.

"We've always known that there's a wonderful halo effect to the Olympics, and that has a positive rub-off on advertisers," Wurtzel said. "With IAG, this is the first time we can empirically measure this effect....To be frank, we charge a lot of money for our airtime and want to be able to justify those premiums."

Of course, it doesn't hurt matters that NBC is over-delivering in prime, averaging 31.3 million viewers through Tuesday night. That breaks down to a 17.8 national rating, well exceeding the network's average guarantee, which buyers peg at around 14.5.

The question now is: Can NBC keep up its momentum? In a few days, Phelps and the rest of his finny friends will depart the Water Cube in order to return to the States. Also leaving Beijing are the gymnasts, which means that track will have to carry the day in the second week.

In the long term, Wurtzel said that NBC would bring TAMi numbers to bear for all of its programming, including entertainment, news and sports. And while it will give clients a good feel for how well NBC's properties function in the omni-platform media universe, TAMi is not meant to be used as a currency.

"That's not what it's designed for," Wurtzel said. "In fact, I'll be happy when it's retired and everything is measured by single-source data. Having said that, advertisers love it because it gives you insight into how people are using media."