• by Shankar Gupta , February 28, 2005

Now that Hilary Swank has won her second Oscar, will she be marketers' next million dollar baby? The same firms that kept an eye on boggers during the Super Bowl should have an answer soon. Last night, buzz monitoring firms like New Media Strategies and Intelliseek turned their attention last night toward February's other big show, the Academy Awards ceremony. The firms intend to spend today analyzing the results.

But while the show is one of those increasingly rare broadcasts that mass audiences watch in real-time--43.5 million viewers tuned in last year, according to VNU's ACNielsen--buzz firms weren't focused on the ads themselves, but the stars.

"We'll be taking a very hard look at the personalities. The marketability of certain celebrities goes up or down based on the Oscars," Intelliseek Chief Marketing Officer Pete Blackshaw said last week.

"All sorts of issues of great consequence to advertisers are on stage at the Oscars--things like celebrities and personalities," Blackshaw said. "Advertisers are thinking about all the critical decisions to be made, like who my sponsor is and where am I going to put my money."

Both Blackshaw and Pete Snyder, CEO of New Media Strategies, downplayed the importance of the ads themselves, despite last year's estimated $1.5 million per 30 second price tag--more than double 1995's price of $700,000.

"Usually with the Super Bowl, the vast majority of the copy is brand spanking new. You don't have as much of that on the Oscars," Blackshaw said. He added: "It's a great place to advertise because you've got captive eyeballs, but it's not as though the ads in and of themselves are part of the show."

Snyder, whose firm also monitored the Internet during the Super Bowl, said that one of the biggest lessons learned from that event is that viewers multitask--watching television with a laptop open and ready, and often blogging in real-time.

"I think live-blogging is going to drive what people think of the show," said Snyder last week, adding: "as the years tick on and we see this multitask viewing getting more and more prevalent--more so then we even expected." New Media Strategies monitored buzz activity during the Super Bowl broadcast on roughly 100,000 different Web logs and community sites, Snyder said. Before the Super Bowl, Snyder predicted a "breakthrough year" for multitask viewing.