Collecting Eyeballs

MediaPost is reporting a new comScore study of Super Bowl viewers which finds that 13% - roughly one out of every eight - viewers watched a Super Bowl ad online after the game. The same percentage - again, roughly one out of every eight viewers - say they visited an advertiser's website after the game.

Given a TV audience estimated at close to 100 million, that's pretty effective advertising. And it gets around TV's real problem: all that Nielsen and the other measuring systems can really tell you is that x number of viewers had their sets on while the ads were running - not how many actually watched. On the other hand, those who went to a web site and actively sought out the ads did actually watch them. And those who went to the advertiser's website took the relationship between consumer and advertisers a significant step further.

Compared with the whopping cost of a Super Bowl ad, I suspect the additional investment involved in getting that ad up online was pretty small - and the payoff would appear to have been very large.