• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 6, 2009

Discovery Channel's home page masthead ad unit on YouTube Sunday promoting Shark Week drove visitors from the computer to the TV tube this week. The YouTube video ad featured four pieces of content that people could click on and view. Interaction rates were up well above the "rich-media standards," according to Adam Stewart, director of entertainment and media at Google, who says YouTube's home page gets more than 30 million U.S. views each day.

Some of those standards are based on benchmarks from DoubleClick rich media interaction rates, such as click-through; interaction and expansion; and average display time, interaction time and the amount of time the ad expands.

TV-related searches on Google's engine are up, according to Stewart. For Shark Week, those keyword terms include the programs name. "In the first half of 2009, compared with 2008, searches for TV-related terms are up more than 30%," Stewart says. "From 2007 to 2008, they also grew by 30%, which makes online effectively target and reach TV viewers online."

Historically, Google has not been able to measure online ads driving offline television shows. Stewart says Google completed in the spring a white-label study with another network to test the effectiveness of the masthead unit on YouTube's viewers. The results were measured by Nielsen. The tests revealed a 115% lift in ratings from people who had seen the ad on YouTube versus those who had landed on Google's video site but did not see the ad.

Discovery also launched a Facebook Connect promotion that pulls in profile data into a custom-generated video that makes it appear as if the user is being eaten by a shark, and prompts him to send it to others to try it out.

And while ads running this week on YouTube have done well, the video promoting the week-long show only had about 14,718 views mid-day Wednesday. The Discovery Network uploaded the video on YouTube Aug. 3.