If the goal is “activation” – i.e., consumer “watches” video, then this goal is different than “drive people to our site”. Knowing how research-driven agencies can be, I have to believe higher (possibly double-digit) activation rates on Facebook and YouTube.

Remember, most consumers will learn how to use websites on sites other than those owned or managed by the brand or its agency. Consumers “know” what they'll get when they go to a familiar environment like YouTube or Facebook, resulting in higher click-through rates than the corporate site.

Lastly, I'm not sure the CTA URL needs to be the same across all messaging venues (ignoring for a moment the standard Facebook/YouTube analytics) – different URLs/toll-free numbers can give you insights beyond those available from traditional analytics in tracking interactions with creative.

And remember that the agency is usually not getting paid “millions” to place the ads, be sure not to aggregate the media spend with agency fee. It's a challenging environment and IMHO it's nice to see agencies trying different approaches beyond placing creative on their website.

I agree that the power of affinity to videos when you pull up YouTube is great – however they all might not be Toyota videos.

Off domain metrics are collectible, but you have to bring them back into a centralized dashboard to make them meaningful and determine if they contributed to your overall goal.

Interestingly I heard from the folks behind the campaign who pointed me to yet another URL which is Uniball-na.com (Uniball North America) which has the messaging from the ad and congruent story.

All that being said it is interesting and bold of these companies to spend marketing dollars and mindshare on companies that are drafting off of the value of sending people their way.

On the other hand, I agree with you. The execution of both of these strategies seems a bit bumbled. If companies go to the trouble of producing additional video content for the internet to supplement their ads, it's MUCH easier to get valuable metrics for their effectiveness if it hits their own domain. So why send viewers to YouTube? The only reason I could see Toyota putting an ad on YouTube is to save bandwidth on their own server. Although usually, it's a GOOD thing to get millions of hits on your website. Maybe then YouTube would want to place ads on Toyota's site!

The Uniball case is a little different. Having people sign up for a free pen and get their valuable personal information is a smart idea. Why, however, direct someone to Facebook for this? One possible reason is ease of use. A LOT of people spend quite a bit of time on Facebook and are familiar with it. Perhaps the marketing people at Uniball thought customers wouldn’t take the time to go to their website or may forget the URL. If they pushed them to go to a Facebook page, it would make the customer do less work since they already spend most of their online time on the social networking site.

I liked Matt Daniels’ comment below mentioning if Uniball has a subpar (he used a different word) website, perhaps using the Facebook functionality is the way to go. However, it appears as though even if the customer goes to the Facebook page, they still have to go to Uniballsuperink.com for the free pen. I agree with you, Eric. This can be very confusing to people who want more information on the product or just want a free pen. They should use Facebook to supplement their ad content and have it be just another integral part of their marketing strategy.

If you've got a shitty website, Facebook seems like a logical destination, especially if the content is at least engaging. I see it as, “for those of you that have paid enough attention to read the tiny link at the bottom of the page–go here for more information.”

It's icing on the cake, not the primary objective. That is, I'd hope Toyota isn't spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to direct people to a YouTube video.

And since when did social media have any accountability metrics?