Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Report: NBC Unpacks Trove of Data From Olympics


For research wonks there’s no event quite like the Olympics. Roughly 217 million people in the United States watched the London Games, making it the most watched television event in history. And unlike other big, live events like the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards, the Olympics offer researchers a prolonged, 17-day period during which to study behavior.

A story by Amy Chozick at nytimes.com reports that eight million people downloaded NBC’s mobile apps for streaming video, and there were two billion page views across all of NBC’s Web sites and apps. Forty-six percent of 18- to 54-year-olds surveyed said they “followed the Olympics during my breaks at work,” and 73 percent said they “stayed up later than normal” to watch, according to a survey of about 800 viewers by the market research firm uSamp.

Forty-six percent said they “delayed doing laundry and other household chores” to catch events like gymnastics, where the United States inched out a win over Russia and Romania for the gold, and swimming, where Michael Phelps narrowly came in second in the men’s 200-yard butterfly.

NBC will work its Olympics lab results into its advertising sales pitch. One study measured viewers’ recollections of 56 brands. The brands advertising during the coverage, especially if the ads were in some way related to the Olympics, registered better recall. Seventy-six percent of respondents said they “enjoyed watching commercials during the Olympics that are tied in some way to the Games.”

The results signaled vast changes from just two years ago in Vancouver, when tablets and mobile video streaming were still in their infancy. The two most streamed events on any device during the London Olympics, the women’s soccer final and women’s gymnastics, surpassed all the videos streamed during the Vancouver Olympics combined.

The growing number of viewers who own tablets will only lead to more streaming.

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