Tracking the Multiscreen Olympics

NBCU Enlists Google, comScore for Cross-Platform Research

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 2/20/2012 12:01:00 AM

Once again, NBCUniversal is looking at the Olympic Games as a gigantic Petri dish for media research.

The programmer has engaged Google and comScore to conduct panel-based research for its 2012 London Olympic Games coverage, aiming to produce two separate “proofs of concept” for single-source measurement of crossplatform usage. NBCU will work with them on a series of projects measuring single-source consumption of video content on broadcast TV, cable networks, PCs, smartphones and tablets.

It’s the third Olympics that NBCU is using to try to crack the code on measuring multiplatform usage. “This is like Halley’s Comet,” NBCU president of research Alan Wurtzel said. “It only comes around every two years.”

MUCH BIGGER SAMPLE

This time, the cross-platform measurement panels will be much bigger than they were for Beijing in 2008 and Vancouver in 2010. For those games, NBCU used devices from San Mateo, Calif.-headquartered IMMI with 40 and 60 consumers respectively — an “almost boutique attempt” at multiplatform measurement, Wurtzel said. IMMI’s technology has since been acquired by Arbitron.

By contrast, Google’s panel spanning TV, mobile and online is slated to be 3,000 strong. ComScore is putting together a 750-member group in partnership with AT&T AdWorks.

NBCU has not announced how much coverage from the 2012 Summer Olympics it plans to present on TV, online and mobile, but “it’s going to be the most it’s ever been,” Wurtzel said. For the 2010 Vancouver games, the programmer served up some 835 hours across multiple platforms.

Wurtzel calls the research project the “Olympics Billion Dollar Lab,” a reference to the $2.2 billion NBCU agreed to pay for U.S. broadcast rights for the 2010 and 2012 games. The company will pay $4.4 billion for the four biennial games from 2014 to 2020.

According to NBC, ad sales for the London Games are tracking well, with slightly more than $900 million of inventory sold as of last week.

The point of the Olympics Billion Dollar Lab is twofold: to measure media consumption of the Olympics itself in reports for programming executives and advertisers, and more broadly to understand how people access content across TV, online, smartphones and tablets. With Google and comScore, NBCU will be able to analyze viewing according to demographic criteria.

“We want to understand not only the usage, but also which measurement methods work better,” Wurtzel said.

The Google and comScore research will not be “a ‘national’ sample,” he added. “The first thing we need to do is prove that we can do it.”

The programmer approached Nielsen and others about cross-platform measurement for the Olympics, but “ultimately for a lot of reasons we went with Google and com- Score,” Wurtzel said.

NBCU hopes to be up and running with Google and comScore by late spring, in order to establish a baseline before the London Olympics, which run July 27 to Aug. 12.

PHONE FRENZY

“This event spans 17 days — nothing else is like that,” Wurtzel said. “It has a huge amount of cross-platform content. I feel that, going into London, with 40% of phones video-friendly, we’re going to see video usage on phones like never before.”

After the Summer Games conclude, NBCU, Google, and com- Score intend to share both the results of consumer media consumption of Olympics video, as well as broader implications about the various approaches to cross-platform measurement, according to the companies.

WATCHING THE WATCHERS

NBCU has commissioned two cross-platform studies for the 2012 Olympics:

Google will assemble an opt-in panel of approximately 3,000 consumers, using a meter-based approach to track usage on different platforms. The Internet giant will employ proprietary algorithms developed specifi cally for NBCU.

ComScore’s 750-consumer panel will be culled from the approximately 10,000 members in the TV, online and mobile panel developed with AT&T AdWorks. Data sources will include U-verse TV set-tops, electronic meters and panelist self-reports.

SOURCE: Multichannel News research