Last week the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News ran a fake ad campaign within their Friday editions to “demonstrate the power of our brands in generating awareness and generating traffic for our advertisers, and put a smile on people’s faces.” We blogged it here.

This week the newspapers released number in a statement:

We recently ran ads for a fictitious airline that were designed to put a smile on your face and to address the timely issue of carbon emissions. But we also did it to make a point. Namely, that advertising in The Inquirer, Daily News and philly.com can be a stunningly effective way to reach the people of the Philadelphia region. The ads for Derrie-Air ran for just one day. While this was not a research project, we're pleased to note that in just three days, we generated over 2.7 million website hits. We had over 210,000 page views. The one-day traffic alone was almost double the average daily page views for airline sites from our region. Hundreds of national and international stories about the Derrie-Air promotion continued to attract visitors to www.flyderrie-air.com.

While those numbers look impressive, I wonder if Philadelphia Media Holdings took into account the number of hits and page views that were generated from Website and blog links covering the campaign. How many hits came organically from the fictitious campaign that ran in the newspaper and on their respective Web properties. And what drove more traffic: the newspaper or the Web ad?