• by February 5, 2004

I was curious as to the amount of traffic Mitsubishi notched on its website after its creative cliffhanger spot during the Super Bowl. To find out, I phoned Ian Beavis, Mitsubishi's senior-VP marketing, product planning and public relations. Beavis said that the dedicated seewhathappens.com site racked up more than 11 million hits in the first six hours after the spot ran; as of Feb. 4, the site had 30 million visits.

"In the first 24 hours [after the spot ran] we had the same number of unique visits to that site that we would normally get in a month on the Mitsubishicars.com site," Beavis enthused. Two-thirds of people who came to seewhathappens.com watched the video clip two-to-three times. "Basically, we've exceeded our strength objective by about 25 percent." Mitsubishi continues to run the spot in network prime, spot and cable TV as part of its ongoing, more than $70 million Galant launch.

Beavis credits Deutsch's Los Angeles-based dream team - Mike Sheldon, managing partner and general manager, and Eric Hirshberg, managing partner and exec- creative director - for pulling off the integrated campaign in short order. "We shot [the spot] the Friday before the Super Bowl on the 105 Freeway near LAX," Beavis says.

The effort, he says, is "all about integrated marketing. You have people who are multimedia consumers. TV is the headline, and the online world gives you everything else." Still, Beavis notes, digital media accounts for less than five percent of the Galant media budget.