Last week I began noticing an outdoor campaign running here in San Francisco featuring Gap’s “INSPI(RED)” and “DESI(RED)” t-shirts and it brought my attention to Bono’s (RED) campaign to raise money to fight AIDS in Africa. The campaign was kicked into high gear with his October 13 appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show. (Product) RED partners Gap, Emporio Armani, Converse, Motorola, Apple, and American Express have produced merchandise that will raise money to benefit the Global Fund to Fight AIDS.
On the day of Bono’s appearance on Oprah, Hitwise shows that US traffic to the Join (RED) website increased by 2600 percent versus the previous day, and the Oprah website was the source of 20.5 percent of visits to Join (RED) that day. This differs considerably from our UK data which show that MySpace was the lead source of traffic for Join (RED), possibly due to a message sent to MySpace UK users. As a US resident, I did not receive a message from MySpace Tom about (RED) and in the US only 2.6% of Join (RED)’s traffic came from MySpace for the week ending October 14, 2006.
What is striking about this campaign is that 66.3 percent of visits to Join (RED) continued on to one of the (Product) RED merchandise partner websites for the week ending October 14, 2006. Gap, as the most visible sponsor, was the leading beneficiary of traffic from Join (RED) website, receiving 26.9 percent of visits to the site last week. What’s so amazing about list of Join (RED)’s downstream sites below is that every single one the top sites is a partner. Usually clickstream tables show visits going back to search engines, competitors, or sometimes unrelated topics. This campaign clearly has the audience engaged with its products and sponsors, which also include MySpace and AIM.

A look at the top search terms that drove traffic to Join (RED) last week show how strongly Bono is associated with the campaign: 9 of the top 20 terms that sent visits to Join (RED) last week contain ‘bono.’ It’s great to see a star of that stature using his celebrity for a good cause, and also to see that people are listening and are interested in buying the products.

This kind of Hitwise data can be used to monitor campaigns such as this and to get daily and weekly updates on how consumers are searching for and reacting to offline media events.