There has recently been two big ad campaigns on tv in which Volkswagen and Vitamin Water advertise Facebook web addresses rather then their corporate web site. These campaigns obviously cost millions to produce. Vitamin Water made an even bigger commitment by sponsoring arguably the two biggest starts in the NBA in Lebron James and Kobe Bryant to be the front men for their campaign all in an effort to drive traffic to a page that is not a corporate site.
I think this is an interesting strategy to drive traffic. Everyone will know to go to vw.com or vitaminwater.com if they want to look at the official site or find more information about those companies. But driving traffic to a social site like Facebook can help them build another web property and focus their message or campaign around a specific topic that otherwise may not flow with the message of the corporate site.
I guess there are some potential drawbacks though by not having the ability to have your own analytics installed on those pages to measure traffic and conversions. Though you have to assume that Facebook is providing them with some type of metrics and traffic reports on their custom pages. Either way you look at it it’s an innovative way of building our brand and directing traffic to a web site.
