• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, May 28, 2004

A lot of people know Claria Corp. as a leading practitioner of online behavioral marketing, but apparently the company is also a pretty good at judging consumer behavior offline. In fact, the Claria folks actually knew American TV viewers would choose Fantasia Barrino over Diana DeGarmo to become Fox's latest "American Idol." The insight came not from Claria's better known business of serving contextual advertising messages online, but from Feedback Research, a lesser known division, which conducts primary research of online behavior via an impressive panel of more than 43 million Claria users.

To illustrate the unit's ability to predict consumer behavior, Feedback Research fielded a non-sponsored study of more than 390,000 visitors to the American Idol Web site between March 16 and May 16, 2004, as well as a simultaneous survey among those users who were also viewers of the TV show to gauge their voting patterns and awareness levels of sponsors of the online and TV properties.

While the findings didn't match the ultimate photo-finish results of the national telephone-based voting used by Fox to pick the winner, they did show a marked preference for Fantasia, who captured 64 percent of the online poll vs. 36 percent for DeGarmo. Then again, given the well-publicized problems Fox had with its phone-based polling system, the network might have been better suited using an online system. In fact, 51 percent of Feedback Research's respondents said they would prefer casting votes via an online system.

In terms of TV sponsorship results, the research found that greatest unaided recall was for Ford (23 percent), followed by Coca-Cola (19 percent) and AT&T Wireless (14 percent). On an aided basis, AT&T Wireless generated a recall of 42 percent, followed by Coca-Cola (40 percent) and Ford (36 percent). AT&T (56 percent) also dominated the aided awareness among online advertisers of the "American Idol" Web site, followed by Ford (52 percent) and Coca-Cola (52 percent). In fact, the research indicates that 2.3 percent of AT&T's own site traffic during the study period was driven from its Idolonfox.com sponsorship. Now that's behavioral marketing at work.

-- By Joe Mandese