• by March 3, 2004

There are some noteworthy findings on consumers' online behavior during Sunday night's broadcast of the Academy Awards. Research conducted by Claria Corp., formerly known as Gator, found that 31 percent of Internet users were online while they watched the Oscars broadcast on ABC, an 11 percent increase over last year.

Of Claria's 40 million active users, more than over 750,000 viewed the Yahoo! Movies 76th Academy Awards website in the week leading up to the show. Some of the other findings:

Diet Pepsi, which sponsored the Yahoo! Movies website, scored a 52 percent aided recall for the brand, while Cadillac, which tied in with Oscar.com, scored a 74 percent aided recall for its brand.

Oscar TV advertisers such as Hewlett-Packard and American Express succeeded in driving traffic to their sites during the broadcast: HP saw a 131 percent increase in traffic, while AmEx achieved a 105 percent spike.

During the ABC broadcast, traffic to Oscar.com surged 700 percent versus its average daily site traffic, and Yahoo! Movies racked up 50 percent of its total traffic for Oscar night during the show for a 150 percent increase in traffic by the end of the broadcast.

If these findings are accurate, there is every reason to believe that consumers, particularly those with always-on broadband connections, are tuning in online during special event TV programming. Their PCs are fired up and they're toggling between TV and the Web, making for some interesting behavior that marketers and media types need to watch--closely.