Exclusive: Audi Drives Off with Massive Inauguration Online Video Jackpot -- Pre-Roll Ad has 70 Million Views

Audi, as the exclusive sponsor of the live webcast of the Obama Inauguration on CBSNews.com, MSNBC.com, ABCNews.com and the WashingtonPost.com, had expected 30 million views of its pre-roll advertisement titled "Progress."  Beet.TV has been told by a spokesperson for Audi USA that its pre-roll ads have been watched nearly 70 million times.  

Here's the breakdown of views of the ad on the various sites provided by Audi: ABCNews.com, 15.9 million; CBSNews.com, 11.4 million; MSNBC.com, 16.3 million;The WashingtonPost, 14 million; Slate, 9 million; and the Atlantic.com, 1.7 million.

Reached in Germany tonight, a spokesperson for Audi USA told me in an emailed statement:

Traffic Problems with Sites May Have Driven More Views

In a strange twist, it may be that some of the widely reported problems with streaming on several sites caused visitors to refresh their browser and see the Audi spot multiple times and increased the number of views.

Audi Parks on Three Evening News Shows on Inauguration Night

As part of this unprecedented sponsorship, Audi was the exclusive sponsor of the evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC on January 20. The sponsorship provided limited interruption.  Viewership of those programs has been estimated by Audi at 19 million.  We expect to see these numbers tomorrow. Here's the Audi spot that ran on the evening news.

The cost of the media campaign was not disclosed, but it would seem that Audi drove off with quite a rich prize.

The Audi campaign was created by the San Francisco-based agency Venables Bell & Partners.  We have posted the pre-roll ad here on Beet.TV.

CNN Delivers Bounty of Views to Sprint, Cisco, Exxon Mobil and Vestas

CNN.com and CNN sold integrated advertising sponsorships for Inaugural coverage to these four sponsors.

Beet.TV has learned that CNN.com generated more than 182 million page views and served more than 36.7 million total video streams on Inauguration Day. Of the 36.7 million video streams, CNN.com Live served 26.9 million live video streams globally, shattering its all time total daily streaming record set on Election Day with 5.3 million live streams (Source: Omniture SiteCatalyst, global). Additionally, CNN.com Live estimates it served more than 1.3 million concurrent live streams during its peak, which occurred immediately prior to President Obama's inaugural address (Source: Internal CDN monitoring data). 

CNN's television ratings are not yet available.

Television Numbers for the Inauguration

Update:  TV Newser has numbers up for broadcast TV coverage of the Inauguration

-- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer