TV to Internet Convergence: How successful is it?

February 1st, 2008

Posted in: Industry Pulse

If you were you among the millions tuned into last night’s long-awaited return of ABC’s hit drama, Lost, then during the show you saw a commercial from Oceanic Airlines alerting you to “stay tuned” for special information.

As a huge ‘Lost’ fan myself, I knew this was something worth waiting for. However, the show was over and the commercial for Oceanic Airlines didn’t actually air until 45 minutes after the season premiere ended, during another show! And I am 100% sure that many true ‘Lost’ fans would know that as well. ;)

So finally what it turned out to be was a short promo (fake obviously) promoting that Oceanic Airlines “will take you to places you’ve never imagined.” Then flashed a website: FlyOceanicair.com. This whole thing was a brilliant idea because people who are fans of ‘Lost’ are known to obsess about any missing clues they can find. So what this did was cause a lot of people to go to the website right away; I know this because I tried to, but couldn’t access the website for about 15 minutes because it was so busy.

This was a perfect example of a successful PC and TV Convergence. This method is also used during highly-viewed events like the Super Bowl. During the 2007 Super Bowl, advertisers used the last 15 minutes of the game (prime time) to get viewers attention by directing them to websites, and they were successful.

According to Bizreport.com, “During the game results showed that web traffic averaged around 160,000 visitors per minute, as opposed to an average of 80,000 in the previous two to three weeks. During the last fifteen minutes of the game the visitors per minute rate was at its highest at 282,546, the majority of which were from the U.S.!”

This is useful information for publishers who not only should be keeping up with whats hot online, but on TV. What makes it even more important is with TV, you need to keep in mind the time-sensitivity factor. Plan head and keep up to date with what is going on around you.

Come back next week and vote for your favorite Super Bowl commercial!

• 

4 Responses to “TV to Internet Convergence: How successful is it?”

1. ABC Helps Eli Stone By Crossing Over LOST Promo Into Eli Says:
   February 2nd, 2008 at 12:37 pm

   […] Karla Escolas at Chitika gives ABC even more props.  The fake Oceanic Airlines commercial wound up promoting a web site: flyoceanicair.com and Karla gives ABC credit for brilliant TV to Internet convergence.  I think she may be right, and I’ll contact someone at HitWise next week to see if they can break out the FlyOceanicair.com portion of the ABC.Com traffic so we can get some real numbers.  […]

2. Eli Stone Drives Lost Viewers to FlyOceanicAir.com WebSite Says:
   February 5th, 2008 at 3:11 pm

   […] It would seem both Stan the Man from the OC, and Karla Escolas at Chitika were both correct,  but perhaps not as correct as I (or they) would’ve hoped.  […]

3. The Chitika Blog » Blog Archive » Advertisers Do The Super Bowl Shuffle Says:
   February 5th, 2008 at 5:54 pm

   […] Last week I discussed ABC’s successful attempt to direct viewers to the web; now, you would think that after spending millions of dollars for ad space during the Super Bowl more than 6% would have also attempted to direct viewers online. They also did not connect the ad to their brand pages on social networks like Facebook. Most advertisers instead invested in search advertising. […]

4. The Chitika Blog » Blog Archive » ABC’s TV to Internet convergence even more successful than I thought? Says:
   February 6th, 2008 at 3:56 pm

   […] I didn’t think I’d be going into more detail about ABC’s successful promo during the season premiere of ‘Lost’ last Thursday evening, but Richard Seidman from TV by the Numbers posted some interesting web data of Flyoceanicair.com that was provided by Hitwise. […]

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website