Palm Pre News: Palm Pre Online Ads/Buzz Successful, Says comScore

comScore, released an analysis of recent online trends related to
the June debut of the Palm Pre. Launched on June 6, the Palm Pre debuted along with Sprint's
innovative "Now Network" marketing campaign.   There was great exposure form the YouTube human clock campaign, search buzz for the Palm Pre shows that the ads worked, but waned with the introduction of the iPhone 3GS. The store location search on Sprint.com increased store location search by 40% due to the Palm Pre, while the introduction of the iPhone 3GS increased store search on AT&T by 90%.  The research also shows that interest in the iPhone 3GS and and Palm Pre were by different audiences.

Palm Pre Search Buzz

comScore suggest that trends
in the number of weekly searchers on terms relating to the Palm Pre show that the "Now Network" advertising campaign conducted by Sprint
during the second half of May helped generate early interest in the
device. The number of searchers more than doubled during the week
ending May 24, coinciding with the YouTube homepage takeover. Interest
declined somewhat during the following week, but rebounded in the two
subsequent weeks after the official launch of the device, with 267,000
searchers for the week ending June 7 and 361,000 for the week ending
June 14. The final two weeks in June saw the numbers of searchers fall
to approximately half the number of the peak week of activity.

Interestingly, this decline in Palm Pre search activity coincided
with the launch of the Apple iPhone OS 3.0 on June 17 and launch of the
iPhone 3GS two days later. Throughout May and the first week of June,
the number of unique iPhone searchers remained fairly consistent at
approximately one million people per week. In the week prior to the
launch of the 3GS, however, the number of iPhone searchers more than
doubled to 2.3 million people during the week of the launch.

The
Palm Pre appeared to resonate with a different audience than those
interested in the iPhone. Of the people who searched for Palm
Pre-related terms during the eight weeks of the study, just 11 percent
also searched on iPhone-related terms, suggesting that the majority of
the people interested in the Palm Pre have little interest in the iPhone.

Buzz
surrounding the Palm Pre began building up in earnest during late May
with the launch of Sprint's "Now Network" ad campaign. Winning the top
award at the 56th Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival
(IAF), the campaign ran in print and TV, but also delivered its message
of connecting customers to information on-demand through an extensive
online ad campaign.

One of the more unique aspects of the digital
ad campaign was a YouTube.com homepage takeover in late May. The ad,
dubbed the "Human Clock," featured a mash-up of user-submitted videos.
For instance, at 11:14, the "Human Clock" ad would display four
different videos of people displaying the 1's and 4's needed to
represent the time, similar to a digital clock.

The ad reached approximately 13 million people on the day the
advertisement debuted, with the gadget-crazed 18-24 year old male
demographic representing a significant portion of the exposed
population. More than one-third (37 percent) of people exposed to the
ad were between the ages of 18-24 and more than 60 percent were male.
In conjunction with other online and offline advertising, this renewed
interest in Sprint helped to generate early buzz for the Palm Pre.

Using Online Campaigns to Drive Offline Sales

While
product-related search activity can offer a proxy for consumer interest
in the devices, traffic to online store locators where the devices can
be purchases likely indicates a higher degree of purchase intent.
comScore examined the impact of the respective device launches on
traffic to the online store locator features at ATT.com and Sprint.com
to understand how such intent may have been impacted. The week the Palm
Pre launched, Sprint.com experienced a 42-percent increase to 137,000
visitors to its online store locator page, followed by a 41-percent
jump to 193,000 visitors the subsequent week. Meanwhile, the AT&T
find-a-store feature on Wireless.ATT.com, saw traffic jump 90 percent
to 295,000 visitors during the week of the iPhone 3GS launch.

About comScore
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