Akamai experiments with super convergence hand-offs

What better venue than football's biggest event to plumb the depths of Web useage as a measurement for television advertising influence?

Akamai Technologies is using its application optimization network to do double-duty on Super Sunday and Saturation Monday to broadly measure via its Akamai Net Usage Index for Advertising how many game-watchers were so impressed with ads during the Super Bowl that they clicked through to the advertisers' Web sites.

More than half of the 28 nationally televised advertisers during the Feb. 5 football fest are Akamai customers. The index will therefore offer a view into the aggregate Web usage patterns before, during and after the game for Akamai’s customers, allowing them to integrate their broadcast advertising campaigns with an online tracking component. (Full disclosure: Akamai is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect B2B podcasts.)

So if advertisers can actually propel mass audience viewers (between mouthfuls of guacamole and swigs of beer) to their web sites -- and create a valued ongoing online dialogue -- they might as well start blogs and podcasts to do the same thing: build a real relationship with their customers, measure it, and improve it.

Who knows, in a few years football teams and advertisers might depend more on blogs and podcasts to drive traffic to the televised games, instead of the other way around.

It will be interesting to see how powerful and effective the convergence of television advertising and Web useage is to create total customer communications between willing and educated buyers and newly enabled sellers.