In the Era of Trackable media, one red hot advertising trend is using traditional forms of media to drive new web traffic.  From TV spots, to magazine ads, to newspaper columns, to direct mailers, to freeway billboards, marketers are trying to push consumers from traditional media onto the Internet. 

If you dont normally think about this kind of stuff, try being conscious of it for the next 24 hours.  You will notice that a clear shift that is upon us.

On the Internet, marketers can design a more targeted, relevant, interactive, and longer lasting experience (the famous example: Burger King's subservient chicken).  Most importantly, marketers can measure every detail of a website visit.  Every impression, every click, and every clickstream is logged, recorded and replayed. Free services such as Google analytics will tell you who is on your site, when they arrived, where they came from, what they clicked on, how long they stayed, and hundreds of other metrics that allow a marketer to dissect patterns and measure interest and behavior.

Simply put, what happens on the Web is trackable. 

Think back a few weeks to the Super Bowl, the most significant day of the year in television advertising.  Countless numbers of TV spots were used by marketers to drive viewers from TV to the web. 

Naturally, it makes sense for companies like GoDaddy.com to drive web traffic, their site is a domain selling storefront, so new web traffic = new customers.  (OK, GoDaddy may not be the best example, they have a history of using half-naked cheerleaders and tangling with TV censorship in an effort to drive web traffic.)

Take another example, this year Doritos ran a Crash the Superbowl program, creating an interactive microsite that allowed consumers to design a superbowl ad by uploading video.  The final super bowl ads were picked out of the thousands of submissions:

And guess what consumers wanted to do after they watched the winning ads?  They went to work on Monday and spent half the day on the Doritos website watching the ads that missed the cut. 

USA today reports that in 2006, only one company, Blockbuster, noticably asked viewers to come to its website.  This year, nearly all super bowl ads were designed to engage web behavior, both before and after the commercial aired on TV.  The idea is simple, hook the visitor on TV and drive them onto the web where the consumer can have a longer lasting and interactive experience. 

Even in cases such as the controversial Snickers ad/website, the content itself backfired, but the desire to drive web traffic was clear.

People are living significant portions of their life online, both at work and at home. As the web encroaches on traditional media, marketers need to rethink the bridge between online and traditional programs, and how they plan to enhance offline campaigns with online content.