• by February 4, 2004

My wakeup call had the desired effect-more than two dozen people weighed in on Super Bowl ads and antics. Most of you commented on the half-time show shenanigans and the lackluster crop of ads. And a fairly typical comment: "The most underwhelming, least creative set of Super Bowl ads in memory."

I mentioned that I found the Mitsubishi Galant spot interesting in its creative cliffhanger which sent viewers to a dedicated web site: www.seewhathappens.com. However, driving consumers to the site is only the beginning. Advertisers and their media buying partners want to know the effectiveness of each dollar spent and how to optimize those dollars across channels. Beyond the one-shot Super Bowl deal I'm sure that Mitsubishi, which continues to run its cliffhanger spot on multiple media outlets, wants to know the specifics on how each channel is spurring traffic to the site. SendTec, a St. Petersburg, FL-based company, has a tool called iFactz which measures online response to offline media. The tool is used to help advertisers optimize their media buys and get more bang for their bucks. It has its roots in direct response TV. SendTec, a direct response agency whose clients include Intuit's QuickBooks and Emode's Tickle, began inserting URLs into direct response TV spots a couple of years ago and started to see big percentage increases in responses. "You want to attribute every response to the media dollars you're spending," says Eric Obeck, SendTec president. For one particular client, SendTec found that 72 percent of responses from a direct response spot that ran on ESPN's Monday night football show came via the Internet versus the 800-number tagged to the spot. That was pretty high, compared to spots for the advertiser that ran against other programming and generated just 38 percent of responses from the Web. The iFactz tool helped determine that the spot that ran on ESPN was effective in generating web traffic. "You have to source the response to the particular medium," Obeck says.

In the case of an ad like Mitsubishi's, iFactz could help an advertiser that's running the spot across multiple channels. The tool can be used to indicate where the traffic to their site is coming from, which spot generated the traffic, what time the spot aired, and more.