The 2010 Winter Olympics are in full swing and what a truly great event the Olympics are. Top athletes from around the world are giving everything they have competing for medals, but more importantly the pride of their home country and some international bragging rights.

If I could, I’d be in Vancouver dressed as Uncle Sam, chanting “U-S-A” the whole time, but I have lacrosse practice and a few classes so I’ll have to settle for a 42” flat screen. Either way I’ll be rooting for our men and women as they hopefully dominate the rest of the world’s athletes.

Now there are a lot of things that Americans are good at but the two that I’m thinking of are sports and…research. Yep, research. This year it is unlikely that NBC will make any money from its broadcast of the Winter Olympics but what they will get is valuable research from the event’s massive audience that might generate additional ad revenue in the time shortly after the last of the medals are handed out.

NBC’s goal is to see how the same person uses both TV and the internet during the Olympics as well as what kinds of video they watch online. This research is building off of a similar project they started during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. In one study during that project, NBC gave 41 Olympics enthusiasts a mobile-phone-based monitoring system that allowed them to track how each person was exposed to the Olympics and for how long. During the winter Olympics, NBC plans to examine how each person uses the internet and TV and what kinds of videos they are watching online. They even plan to track if the video is something being viewed for the first time or if it was a repeat view of an event already seen on TV. NBC hopes to be able to use this information to persuade advertisers to spend more money.

The Olympics provides NBC with millions of potential subjects to analyze because it attracts such a huge and diverse audience. The 2010 Winter Olympics could bring in as many as 200 million viewers, an increase from the 2006 Winter Olympics which recorded 184 million viewers. According to Alan Wurtzel, President of Research at NBC Universal, “Big events such as the Olympics often get viewers to test out new viewing behaviors, simply because the event has such a high water-cooler quotient.” The tricky part will be figuring out why people are watching what they are watching and why they are viewing it on TV, a PC or a mobile device.

NBC will also work with Google and TiVo to track additional data. So while we are all enjoying the greatness of the events that comprise the Winter Olympics, NBC will be hard at work trying to track and turn audience behavior into advertising Dollars. Let’s not lose sight of what’s really important though, and that is American gold medals! So let’s grab a beer and cheer on our fellow Americans, eh?

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About Author: Dave O’Neill is a senior at St. John Fisher College and a Research Intern at Dixon Schwabl. “I love hockey, lacrosse (it’s my senior season at SJFC), hunting and fishing. I can’t imagine there is a better place to work than Dixon Schwabl and I absolutely love being a part of such a great company.”