• by Wayne Friedman , July 8, 2008

To give sports advertisers a more complete picture of how its viewers/users interact with its Beijing Olympics, NBC will be using its previously announced TAMI research initiative for the two-week event, which kicks off August 8.

With TAMI -- Total Audience Measurement Index -- NBC Universal will look to measure total media usage - network, cable, mobile and Internet -- of some 3,600 hours of programming through 17 days of coverage.

NBC will also use Olympics cross-platform media usage for future analysis. One of the holy grails for marketers and TV researchers has been data that would follow consumers from one media platform to another.

NBC, with research company Integrated Media Measurement Inc. (IMMI), will use a panel of some 40 people who will carry a special IMMI cell phone that picks up audio cues from all NBC Universal platforms that carry Olympics coverage. This includes the Internet, where 2,200 hours of programming will be streaming broadband video. Additionally, NBC will use an online survey of 500 consumers per day.

Analysis will determine the amount of time consumers spent with various media, the time of day of that usage, including out-of-home consumption.

NBC first announced the TAMI research initiative back in March 2007, during NBC program development meetings back by Alan Wurtzel, president of research for NBC Universal. Back then, Wurtzel noted that other media platforms can significantly boost a traditional TV network show. For example, the network's "Heroes" pulled in 16 million total viewers for a particular episode. But when adding in a repeat episode on the Sci-Fi Channel, a streaming video run on the NBC Rewind site, downloads at iTunes Music Store and viewing via PCs with Intel Viiv technology, the new total is 18.4 million viewers.

He noted in that under certain conditions, adding Internet to TV exposure could increase viewer "reach" by 50%.