As the Nine Inch Nails viral campaign continues, its brilliance is starting to show. Nevermind the released tracks or the storyline being concocted for this campaign – do not get me wrong, they are both amazing – but that is entirely beside the point of this article.

With a few small websites, a couple flash drives containing MP3 files, and a whole boat-load of creativity, this viral campaign has caught fire – with three articles hitting the front page of Digg and tons of buzz generated elsewhere (online and offline). The Year Zero viral campaign has definitely succeeded and continues to draw attention much longer than the usual “marketing spikes” do. From my view, this is a major score for the media 2.0 corner. With the media/advertising blitz of the Super Bowl still resonating I thought it would be interesting to see how the marketing campaigns of media 1.0′s Goliath compared to the Nine Inch Nails viral project.

Below are Alexa’s traffic results for NIN.com versus four companies that advertised during the Super Bowl:

The NIN viral campaign beats all of them out and seems to have greater staying power than all four of the competitors as well. I am well aware that, to a certain extent, this is comparing apples to oranges. Most of these companies do not rely heavily on their website for success and their ads were offline to begin with. It is asking a lot of an individual to go to a website through a TV ad – no doubt about it. All that being said, I would expect a lot if I spent $2.5 million for 30 seconds or airtime. As can be seen from the chart above, just like those 30 seconds, the public’s attention came and went very quickly. Unlike a 30 second ad, an online presence is always available and can be constantly updated.

I thought it would only be fair to throw a dot-com into the equation:

As for a dot-com versus dot-com comparison, SalesGenie.com spent $3.7 million for their Super Bowl advertisements and obviously got a big spike. However, from the diagram below, that spike did not last too long and it appears as though the NIN campaign could pass it up in the next few days. It really does beg the question if a couple of 30 second spots will continue to make sense versus a creative, sustained and continually evolving bridge between the advertiser and its target audience.

With the net generation watching less TV, will these ridiculously expensive ads finally be seen for what they really are – ridiculous? We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to full-fledged creative online marketing campaigns. I have no illusions that many will be as fun and generous as the NIN campaign, but these sorts of results from a very off-mainstream viral theme for a relatively niche band is pretty amazing. I personally have found this entire sequence of events absolutely fascinating and makes me very excited to see how things will continue into the future.