• by Masha Geller , March 26, 2003

Sunday's Oscarcast may have delivered the worst TV ratings in years, but those advertisers who included the web in their sponsorship plans shouldn't be too disappointed. Especially Diet Pepsi.

Feedback Research, a division of The Gator Corporation, today released the results of an analysis of Gator users' online behavior during the show, which showed Diet Pepsi's online sponsorship of the top Oscar related website generated significant increases in its brand awareness, and many Academy Awards television advertisers, including Cadillac, Pepsi and Charles Schwab, generated a spike in online traffic to their sites.

Diet Pepsi, the advertiser sponsoring the Yahoo! Movies Academy Awards site generated high awareness of its sponsorship of the "Take Home A Theater" sweepstakes, showing a 20% recall of the Diet Pepsi sponsorship. Notably, for every person clicking on the Diet Pepsi ad, 3 people navigated to the Diet Pepsi sweepstakes page on their own (so much for click-throughs.)

What's more, the Cadillac, Pepsi, and Charles Schwab TV ads generated a significant spike in traffic to their sites during the broadcast. Cadillac saw a 75% traffic increase, Pepsi registered 61% more visitors and Schwab traffic rose 14%. Interestingly, 78% to 98% of the traffic to each of these websites was from consumers who had not viewed these sites in the past three weeks.

Expectedly, during the show, Oscar.com experienced a 1000% increase in visitors vs. the average daily traffic from Monday to Saturday. Yahoo! Movies (my personal favorite) captured an 80% share of users viewing Oscar/movie news sites for the week ending March 23, and a 61% share on Sunday. As the show began, Oscar.com was the top site with a 56% share of movie news traffic. As the show progressed, viewers shifted to Yahoo! Movies, which captured 60% of traffic by the end of the night.

Just something to think about before the next award season is upon us.