ABC’s TV to Internet convergence even more successful than I thought?

February 6th, 2008

Posted in: Industry Pulse

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 Robert Seidman from TV by the Numbers posted some interesting web data of Flyoceanicair.com that was provided by Hitwise.

Robert says that the ratings to the promo by ABC weren’t as successful as he thought due to the decrease in traffic to the originally promoted site Flyoceanicair.com. However, not only do I disagree I have actually realized the promo was even more brilliant than I originally thought.

The decrease in traffic to Flyoceanair.com is completely expected since the site itself contains nothing but pretty clouds and flight attendants. People that are still going to Flyoeanicair.com are going out of curiosity or because they don’t know better; “Losties” like to share what they think (there are hundreds of forums with thousands of discussions on theories, etc.), and when something interesting leaks, they flock.

In this case people are going straight to Find815.com because it starts a mysterious story where you can help an as-yet-unknown man find his missing girlfriend. ‘Lost’ fans are taking it as some sort of spoiler from the producers or hoping it has something to do with what will happen soon in the show; neither of which we know yet. This probably would explain the sudden spike in traffic to Find815.com and not Flyoceanicair.com.

So I guess this wouldn’t make for good convergence to the original site that we saw on TV but not only was ABC able to grab the attention with this commercial, they were then able to get the website within the website MORE traffic than the original promoted site!

Why is this impressive?
Let take for instance the “10-second rule”. You have 10 seconds to get your audience’s attention, so you had better make your point or forget it - you lost them. Not to mention if you ask them to click through to a site, you’ll lose 50%, then ask them to click through again, you lost 40%, maybe more. So dare I say that this promo was twice as successful that I had thought?

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3 Responses to “ABC’s TV to Internet convergence even more successful than I thought?”

1. Robert Seidman Says:
   February 6th, 2008 at 5:12 pm

   Hi Karla, just because I don’t see eye to eye on you on just how brilliant it was, doesn’t make me a “Dick”. My name is Robert : )

2. Robert Seidman Says:
   February 7th, 2008 at 11:35 am

   You might have seen this already, but here is some more info from hitwise:

   http://weblogs.hitwise.com/heather-dougherty/2008/02/lost_returns_with_plenty_of_on.html

3. Chitika Says:
   February 7th, 2008 at 12:22 pm

   Hi Robert,

   My apologies for the name! I fixed it right away. Hey it’s great they we were able to give our readers two sides of the story.. if everyone saw eye to eye all the time nothing would be interesting ;) Hope we can collaborate again soon!

   -Karla

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