• by Wayne Friedman , August 20, 2008

NBC's Beijing Olympics may be losing a bit of steam in terms of viewership, but this has done nothing to hurt additional advertising sales, as the network has raked in another $15 million since the start of the games.

On Monday night, August 19--the first night after the high-profile swimming events concluded--NBC earned a still-strong 15.8 rating/26 share in household data, down 8% from its 10-day average of 17.2 rating/30 share.

No matter. On top of its $10 million in additional advertising sales NBC made since the start of the games, NBC has booked another $15 million in Olympic revenue--mostly coming from retail, movie, packaged goods and pharmaceutical advertisers. This $25 million was on top of the $1 billion in advertising sales NBC said it contracted for with advertisers before the Olympics began.

NBC was able to make such sales because of its over-delivery of ratings points offered to advertisers. Before the event, advertisers were guaranteed a household rating of around 14.5, which means NBC is performing 11% ahead of projections.

NBC kept inventory on hand just in case TV viewership came in under-promised. When that didn't happen, NBC released that extra commercial inventory for sale to TV advertisers--those who didn't initially buy or those looking to add more TV commercials.

Total viewers for the 10 days of the Olympics so far has averaged 29.8 million--14% better than Athens in 2004, which was at 26.2 million.

NBC also released results of a Nielsen IAG study on the value of Olympics advertising. Brand recall of TV commercials in the Olympics reached levels that were 130% higher than those in other prime-time programs. Message recall in the Olympics was more than twice as high that of other prime-time programs. TV commercial likeability in the Olympics was nearly three times as high as performance in other prime-time programs.