Hitwise: Consumers Deluge Dove.com After "Apprentice" Plug

Contestants on the fourth episode of the current "Apprentice" failed their assignments to create an ad for Unilever's Dove Body Wash, but the show still managed to spark a weekly 1,512 percent increase in traffic to the Web site www.dove.com, according to a report released Monday by research company Hitwise.

After the airing of the Feb. 10 episode, Yahoo!'s Apprentice Web site posted a link to Dove.com--which accounted for 50 percent of all visits to the site on Feb. 11. Also on Feb. 11, an MSNBC.com article about the players' bad luck with creating an ad was responsible for 15 percent of visits to the site. Searches on the term "dove" also increased by 1,062 percent for the week ending Feb. 12, compared to the prior week.

Other marketers to see an Apprentice-related spike in traffic to their Web sites include Pontiac, which had a 180 percent week-over-week jump in visits the week that an April 14 episode featured the Pontiac Solstice, and Domino's Pizza, which saw a 64 percent week-over-week traffic increase in traffic during the week of the March 31 show.

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