CALIFORNIA: It may have been the least watched Oscar telecast ever in the US but a study shows that TV and Internet advertisers have reason to celebrate.
Feedback Research, a division of The Gator Corporation a behavioural marketing company, conducted an independent analysis. A press release from the company says that its analysis has shown that Diet Pepsi's online sponsorship of the top Oscar related Web site Yahoo! Movies Academy Awards site - http://www.movies.yahoo.com - generated significant increases in its brand awareness.
In addition, many Academy Awards television advertisers in the US, including Cadillac, Pepsi and Charles Schwab, generated a spike in online traffic to their sites on Sunday evening.
Of Gator's 35 million active users, approximately 650,000 viewed the Yahoo! Movies Oscar Web site in the week leading up to the show. Feedback Research measured user response to the Diet Pepsi sponsorship and conducted a survey with a sample of 375 users who had recently viewed the site.
A second Feedback Research survey was conducted among 60,000 users during the Academy Awards. Finally, Feedback Research assessed online traffic to Web sites of companies who ran television ads during the show. The results indicate the following:
- The line separating the use of television and Internet is blurring. 20 per cent of Internet users were online at the same time they watched the Academy Awards.
- There was a 20 per cent recall of the Diet Pepsi sponsorship of the Take Home A Theater sweepstakes on the Yahoo movies site. For every person clicking on the Diet Pepsi ad, three people navigated to the Diet Pepsi sweepstakes page on their own.
- TV ads pull viewers to the web. Cadillac, Pepsi, and Charles Schwab were major advertisers during the Academy Awards. The TVCs run by them generated a significant spike in traffic to their Web sites during that time period. For Cadillac it was an increase of 75 per cent, for Pepsi 61 per cent and for Charles Schwab 14 per cent.
The news gets better. Between 78 - 98 per cent of the traffic to each of these sites was from consumers who had not viewed these sites in the past three weeks.
As reported earlier this week by indiantelevision.com, the news for ABC did not make for happy reading. The broadcasters three-and-a-half hour live broadcast of the ceremony, garnered a household rating of 20.4, the lowest level going back to the very first televised Oscar show in 1953.
Feedback Research offers a breakthrough way to communicate one-to-one with over 30 million consumers while they surf the Web. Its technology makes it possible for advertisers to gather data from consumers based on their actual online behaviour, says a release.The Gator Corporation works with software developers to create ad-supported software.
