Chevy TV spots a perfect test case

Three things really stuck in my head last night as I watched the Colts defeat the Patriots on live national television. First, John and Al REALLY like Peyton Manning. Second, Marvin Harrison is a stud. Third, Chevy is spending a LOT of money on NFL. The Silverado commercial featuring John Mellancamp’s, “this is our country,” song at least once at every break during the first half of the game.

This morning I woke up thinking about Chevy’s strategy, and I decided to blog. Lo and behond, when I opened my browser to my Yahoo homepage, there was the Silverado banner!

So in addition to the national TV spot (and they probably bought other NFL games yesterday), Chevy spent another cool $500K(ish) to get the Yahoo! home page. (Ford Fusion is on MSN.com this morning and American Express is on AOL’s home page).

Chevy’s media strategy makes complete sense to me. Chevy wants to sell trucks, so they bought the biggest young, male TV audience available and augmented with at least one major on-line portal. At the same time, isn’t it possible that Chevy may get better ROI (for its NFL TV buy) if it supplemented with NFL team sites, either instead of or in addition to Yahoo!?

Here is a graph showing yesterday’s unique visitors at Colts.com.

The blue bars represent yesterday. The green line represents last Sunday (when the Colts played the Broncos). The Yellow link is Saturday’s traffic.

If you take a close look, you’ll notice that the heaviest traffic period yesterday was between 8PM (kickoff) and Midnight (end of game). Likewise, last Sunday traffic peaked between 4PM and 8PM. These visitors are visiting our site AND watching the game on TV simultaneously! Perhaps they’re even visiting at the commercial breaks, and tuning out the Chevy spot? Either way, a Chevy buy at Colts.com would have supported the TV spot nicely, reached the most AVID Colts fans, and created a relevant connection between Chevy and the Colts.

As you can see from the Unique visitor graph, Colts.com doesn’t have nearly the gross reach that Yahoo! has, but I would submit that Colts.com reaches the most passionate and influential Colts fans, all across the country. If this is true, then Chevy out to consider adding colts.com to it buy either as a way to support its national efforts, or to supplement the local groups.

Here’s a breakdown of yesterday’s traffic by Designated Market Area.

These are merely the top 10 DMAs sending visitors to Colts.com yesterday. A quick glace reveals traffic coming from all over the country. Along with Indianapolis and a few other Indiana DMAs, the cities sending the most traffic to Colts.com are Louisville, Chicago, New York, etc. (Note: the Colts are the #1 favorite team in Louisville – ESPN Sports Poll 2006).

So imagine you’re a big Colts fan. You’re sitting in Washington, D.C. You turn on the TV, watch the game, see the Chevy spot (over and over), then jump to Colts.com and you see a special offer from Chevy JUST for Colts fans. OK, maybe it’s not a special offer. Maybe you just see Chevy and the Colts associated more directly. Wouldn’t this hammer home the message for Chevy better than a generic banner on Yahoo?

(BTW, it doesn’t hurt that John Mellencamp lives in Bloomington, IN and is, I assume, a Colts fan. That connection makes the Chevy / Colts brand partnership even more reasonable. Anyway…)

When you click the banner on Yahoo, you’re brought to this landing page, which tells you more about the Silverado, and offers you the option to type in your zipcode to find a dealer near you. I typed in my home zip and was brought to this page:

This is a list of Central Indiana Chevy dealers. These guys are direct sponsors of the Indianapolis Colts. They invest money with the team, and yet a Yahoo! visitor would never know that. In fact, the local Chevy dealers have not added Colts.com to their sponsorship yet, so browsers on this day may never make that emotional connection between the Colts and Chevy trucks.

You may be saying to yourself, “but if the local dealers bought Colts.com, they’d be wasting their money on visitors who come to the site from other markets.”

This is not necessarily true. Thanks to geotargeting made possible by our ad serving technology, if Chevy corporate didn’t pay for the national exposure on Colts.com, the local dealers could choose to serve their ad ONLY to site visitors who come from Indiana or the Indy DMA. This would allow the local group to buy the Website very efficiently.

I’m running out of time. It’s 7am and I can hear my 10 month old son waking up. It’s getting to be about time for me to head into the office anyway. But before I sign off, let me make one point.

I’m not suggesting that Colts.com is a replacement for Yahoo! But what I am saying is that Colts.com (and other team sites) offer great ways for Chevy and other brands who are buying national media to reach NFL fans. I am suggesting that such brands consider testing some programs with NFL team sites to see if overall performance is boosted by closer tie-in to the NFL TEAMS. This would take a bit more work, but I believe it would net better results.