Common wisdom has it that we’re fragmenting as a media audience, and that the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards are the only major unifying “event” TV left on the annual schedule. After those, it’s believed, we start breaking up into smaller niche interest groups: the NCAA Final Four, the American Idol season finale, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, and so on.

The common wisdom may want to head back to school for some adult ad courses, because while the Super Bowl hit its biggest audience numbers ever this year—97.5 million viewers—the Academy Awards show turned in its lowest viewership in history, 32 million.

That’s still one-third of the U.S. population, of course, and the price of $1.8 million for a 30-second spot during the Oscars broadcast reflected the fact that it’s hard to gather that many people in front of the TV anymore. But in contrast to the Super Bowl, where marketers tried harder than ever this year to extend that half minute of audience attention by leading viewers to engage with them on the Internet, Oscar advertisers gave a pretty poor performance when it came to search marketing their TV spots, or simply enabling them to get found.

“Contrary to what we’ve been seeing in other big events like the Super Bowl, the Oscar advertisers didn’t do a very good job of integrating their commercials with their online campaigns,” says Janel Landis, director of search strategy and development for digital marketing agency SendTec. “I think one explanation for this weak performance is that until about two weeks before the ceremonies, no one was sure the Oscars were going to take place.”

Landis says she stayed up late running down the elements of each Oscar ad’s online campaigns and rating integration on the following criteria:

• Did the TV spot give a visual or audible URL for viewers to track down on the Web?

• Was there a clear call to go online?

• Did marketers bid on search terms related to the ad: the brand or product name, the relevant generic keywords, search terms related to the Academy Awards broadcast, and other terms viewers might think of from the commercial’s content?

• Once online and at the proper URL, did they find the landing page or Web site relevant to their interest in the TV spot?

Among marketers who did well at linking their TV spot to deeper, richer online content, Landis says, was pasta and frozen food maker Bertolli, which launched a “Romantic Nights In” user-generated content contest with its Academy Awards ad. According to Landis, the marketer earned the evening’s highest marks for offline/ online integration. The spot included a strong call by spokesman/ TV chef/ restaurateur Rocco DiSpirito for viewers to go to www.BertolliNightsIn.com. The URL came in both visual and voiceover form. And once there, viewers found a Web site designed expressly for the “Nights In” contest, including a copy of the Oscars spot and a place to upload their videos showing how Bertolli products fit the romantic occasion.

“I’d give them three and a half out of four points for the campaign,” Landis says. “They did have sponsored search ads for the brand name ‘Bertolli’. But they didn’t do any search marketing on terms like ‘pasta’, ‘pasta contest’ or the celebrity name ‘Rocco DiSpirito’.” Viewers who missed the URL were likely to search on these terms for more information or simply to see the spot again, and Bertolli in turn missed a chance to drive more traffic to the site by not running search ads on some obvious generic terms.

“They should have put their ads out on more words in search,” Landis says. “Most people don’t remember a brand; they remember a type of product, or the concept of a commercial. So if anyone was searching on the chef’s name or on pasta-related words, they definitely did not find Bertolli.”

Landis didn’t bring it up, but Bertolli could probably have used stronger search marketing to smooth over the fact that the contest URL used their brand name rather than “RomanticNightIn.com”, the name viewers with less than perfect attention might have been looking for—completely in vain.

Another marketing winner on Oscar night was Jaguar, which took the occasion to showcase a new model, the Jaguar XF. Unlike Bertolli or indeed any other Oscar advertisers this year, Jaguar deployed a full menu of Oscar-related keywords as well as search ads on terms related to its new model, its brand and automotive generally, Landis says. The company also had a dedicated Web site for the new launch, www.JaguarXF.com, up and running before the broadcast.

No full marks for jaguar either, though, according to Landis, because the TV spot did not contain the XF Web site address or any call for viewers to go online for more information. “The site is great, with a lot of video and interactive features,” she says. “But they could have had even more customer engagement by calling it out during the TV spot.” That URL lapse might have done Jaguar less harm than it would have done other marketers, since car shoppers almost reflexively go online to research models that interest them.

Other than those two, most of the ceremony spots fell down seriously at the task of bridging TV viewers over to their online content, according to Landis. Case in point: GMC, which ran two spots during the broadcast featuring the Yukon Hybrid and the Acadia, a crossover SUV. Viewers who did a Google search on “GMC Yukon” found a paid search ad that pointed to the regular model, not the hybrid featured in the commercial.

The Acadia spot gave viewers only the main GMC.com Web site to turn to. Once there, they found a site that featured the car maker’s “March Madness” promotion, but nothing recognizably relevant to the Oscars ad. And searching on “crossover”, the term most likely to be recalled from the commercial (since the Acadia is a new GMC model) produced plenty of sponsored search ads—for cars from Saturn, Nissan, Chrysler, Ford, and other automakers, but not GMC.

“I’m sure all the other car manufacturers appreciated the boost in clickthroughs,” she says.

Dove was an early favorite to win credit for doing the best job integrating its offline Oscars ads with online promotion. The company had been a standout in SendTec’s evaluation of the 2007 ceremonies, and this year it was planning actually to wind up a user-generated content (UGC) contest with a live call-in vote during the Academy Awards broadcast.

The mechanics of that final voting may have gotten in the way of doing any search marketing around the spot. While viewers could choose which of two amateur commercials for Dove Supreme Cream Oil Body Wash should get national airplay at the end of the broadcast, the early spot telling them how to vote sent them to the official Oscars Web site, not to a site run by Dove for the promotion. They could also vote via mobile phone short code.

But neither of those will help the winning spot– a short video entitled “Speedy Spa”– get found now that the broadcast is over, Landis says. Dove drew 3,500 entries for the Cream Oil UGC contest, more than twice the number of submissions for a similar contest last year.

But they failed to help viewers find those entries or the winner by search marketing against branded terms like “Dove contest winner” or more generic terms such as “contest winner”.

“They also weren’t bidding against any Oscar-related keywords, which was probably more important for Dove than other advertisers because that’s where the final vote was being hosted,” Landis points out. “If you didn’t know to go to Oscar.com to vote, you’d be looking for a Dove site. Some viewers at least could have been confused.”

J.C. Penney has a large e-commerce site and does a lot of search marketing. But while the commercial that introduced the retailer’s new “American Living” line of casual clothing ran a lot—an awful lot—during the Oscars broadcast, nothing in it led viewers to the Penney Web site or to any specific landing page for the new line.

Again, that lapse is all the more difficult to understand because J.C. Penney has arranged to donate 5% of every qualifying iTunes download of the music track under the American Living spot, Alison Kraus and Robert Plant’s version of “Killing the Blues”, to Penney’s Afterschool Fund charity. At the very least, Rounder Records might have wanted to piggyback on the ads promote Raising Sand, the album from which the song was taken. But neither the retailer nor the music publisher nor iTunes took advantage of the commercial’s moment in the spotlight to engage viewers with a little search marketing.

Oscar advertisers might excuse their not-ready-for-prime-time search performance at the awards by pointing to the last-minute nature of the broadcast generally. Thanks to the Hollywood writers’ strike, it wasn’t until two weeks before Feb. 24 that anyone could be sure there would in fact be an Oscars broadcast. The production reflected that somewhat slapdash ramp-up, with lots of clips of past award winners and with old ad campaigns outnumbering new ones by four or five to one.

But the fact remains that Oscar air time still represented a sizeable investment in old media exposure, and yet most of the brands that bought viewers’ eyeballs during the show didn’t exhibit the right level of online follow through.

“Advertisers should have been able to mount search campaigns to reinforce their brands with viewers interested enough to go online,” Landis says. “One of the best things about search marketing is that it goes up quickly and comes down fast. It just takes a bit of effort and forethought to pull keyword campaigns together.”