Audi A3 camboomo!

Shankar Gupta, reporting for MediaPost on a panal at OMMA East yesterday, listened closely and heard something shocking:

Brian Clark, the CEO of GMD Studios, recounted a campaign that his agency ran for Audi, titled “The Art of the Heist.” Just one-half of one percent of the media buy budget, Clark said, was spent on BlogAds–a firm run by panel moderator Henry Copeland, which sells ad space on some of the highest-trafficked blogs. Those ads, Clark said, ended up accounting for 29 percent of the traffic sent to the campaign’s landing page.

For folks who aren’t reading the ad trade press, that was a giant eight-figure campaign and much ballyhooed, so this is a particularly astonishing number. Brian said that this weird “hand-made” ad, shot with a Treo phone, worked particularly well and led to a re-alignment of the creative direction of the campaign.

Update I should note that the A3 campaign won a bunch of Mixx awards on Wednesday night. If you go to day 10 of this timeline, you’ll read that “The media cost for the entire blog ad buy was less than the cost of one banner ad on a mainstream site such as Yahoo. The blog ad appeared on sites such as metafilter, lockergnome and dailykos.” Tie it all together: thanks to some stunning creative and savvy choice of blogs, 29% of the campaign’s traffic was driven for the cost of a banner on Yahoo.