Digital ROI: BizWorks360 Blog

Integrated Media Meter: The 2010 Academy Awards

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The 82nd Annual Academy Awards, broadcast last night on ABC, enjoyed its largest audience in five years, totalling 41.3 million people. While this audience pales in comparison to the 106 Million watching last month's Super Bowl, the Academy Awards television broadcast still ranks as the second biggest audience of the year.  

Given the size of the audience and the fact that much of the audience are women who actually buy products, television commercials during the Oscar-cast are sold at a premium with this year's slots going for $ 1.4 - 1.5 Million for a 30-second spot.  In light of the significant investment that each of the advertisers were making, I thought I would reprise the Integrated Media Meter analysis that I put together for the Super Bowl.  As I did with the Super Bowl Integrated Media meter, I did not focus on the television show promotions or the movie trailers.  I focused on the level of digital integration in last night's commercials. See chart below.

Social media integration was a key component for two of these advertisers - Samsung and JC Penney with JC Penney focused on the days leading up to the Oscars.  In the case of Samsung, they sponsored ABC.com's 'red carpet" with a facebook chat function built in.  It was cool, but it took me almost an hour before I could even log on via Facebook Connect!

During the Oscarcast, three advertisers got this multichannel customer interested in checking out their unique URL's pased on the message of their campaingns:

• American Express inspired me to check out its Take Part initiative at www.takepart.com.
• Coca Cola's link to livepositively.com had me wondering what that meant given the questionable health benefits of drinking sugar or diet soda! I also had to check out how I could "stay extraordinary" by drinking Diet Coke.
  
• Cottonelle actually got me to go online and vote at CottonelleRollpoll.com  
  

Missed Opportunities?

I think that JC Penney had the biggest missed opportunity of the night.  They aired 7 commercials which must have cost them a minimum of $ 10 Million in advertising dollars.  They flashed the JC Penney name throughout the ad, but only had a quick flash to its corporate URL at the end. 

Couldn't they have:

• used the running text to promote more intereaction online? 
• featured the commercials run on the home page of their corporate website?
• asked people to join their facebook community of 783,714 fans to engage with the ads online?
• set up a separate landing page on their website for the oscar commercials?
• provided replays of their commercials on Facebook after they aired during the Oscarcast?

I was also surprised by Bertolli's featuring their upcoming webisode series "Into the Heart of Italy" featuring Oscar winner Marissa Tomei, chef and restauranteur Rocco DiSpirito and game show host and actor Dan Cortese.  There was no link provided for more information on the webisode series.  When I searched for "Into the Heart of Italy", it was clear that Bertolli (owned by Unilever) hasn't yet gotten around to search engine marketing about the webisode series.  Also searching for last night's promotion on You Tube took a lot of digging.  In order to save you time, check out the preview below.



Integrated Media Meter Chart