Since the Super Bowl is one of the biggest nights for television, companies are putting their best foot forward to engage their audience. Formerly a one-day event, Super Bowl advertising has morphed into a multi week campaign to keep viewers curious. Last year, CBS was charging companies $3.8-$4 million for a slot in the Super Bowl ads. This isn’t too surprising since it’s the biggest football game of the season. Unfortunately for some companies, the biggest game also caused their website’s to experience downtime.
Last year, Coca-Cola directed users to Cokechase.com. The site showed three teams all dressed in unique costumes, competing to be the first to reach a giant Coke. To engage viewers, Coca-Cola allowed viewers to vote for the winning team. The online aspect failed as soon as Coca-Cola ran its first in-game Super Bowl TV ad. The page load time averaged 50 seconds – which was longer than their entire (30 second) commercial. Since users expect websites to load in 2 seconds or less, they were not very happy.
The year prior (2012) in the Super Bowl, It was the Patriots against the New York Giants. Coca-Cola used their animated polar bears to react to the game, consumer tweets, and Facebook messages all in real time. One bear cheered for the New York Giants, while the other supported the New England Patriots. The traffic was too much and the site went down long enough for the company to put up a maintenance page.
If website traffic is something that companies are afraid of taking on this year, we can expect more advertisers integrating social media to get viewers involved in the discussion. For example, with the power of Twitter in the final three minutes of the 2012 Super Bowl, there were an average of 10,000 Tweets per second. Last year there were 231,500 tweets-per-minute during the power outage and 268,000 tweets-per-minute at the end of Beyonce’s half-time show.
The strong trending of hashtags is something you’ll see in the Super Bowl again commercials this year. If we look at this commercial from Bud Light. The slogan is “Whatever is coming. Are you #UpForWhatever?”. Well, what about Facebook? With 140 characters, Twitter is better at engaging real time conversations. To compete with Twitter, Facebook has made several tweaks to their feed by displaying trending topics on the right hand side of the bar last month. To compare these two platforms, During the 2013 Super Bowl, Twitter was mentioned in 26 of the 52 national TV commercials. Facebook was mentioned in just four of those commercials.
This Sunday an average of 108 million viewers will tune into the Super Bowl XLVIII. Advertisers will take advantage of the giant platform for brand exposure. $4 million for a 30-second spot is no problem when this event has one of the biggest audience for a single program. These companies will also use hashtags as a metric to measure their success from the viral conversations. If you’re not talking about the outcome of the Super Bowl after this weekend, you’ll at least be talking about the commercials.
