The Super Bowl is more than a competition to determine the best football team in the NFL. It's a testing ground for the best advertising and consumer marketing U.S. advertisers can throw at the estimated 108 million Americans watching the game.
"[The Super Bowl] has become as much a digital event as a marketing event," said M.J. Johnson, director of product marketing at Akamai, one of two content-delivery networks (CDNs) that helped spread the load of responding to user requests to servers around the world.
"From a traffic perspective it grows every year, and grows in interesting ways," Johnson said. "This year it wasn't just incremental traffic, it was a concentrated effort to have the online or streaming experience supplement the TV experience."
Akamai measured Internet traffic during the Super Bowl. Source: Akamai
That was a big change from the 2012 game, according to ReadWriteWeb, which argued that advertises failed to "meaningfully connect their message to their social media platforms." However, the effort carries some risk--including high expectations among viewers for interactivity, streaming media and quick response times.
Slow response times, more than almost any other factor, can ruin a user's view of a brand and a website, even for sites that perform well outside of game day, according to Ben Grubin, marketing director at Compuware APM, an application performance management company. Compuware used its performance-monitoring tools to keep tabs on the performance of advertisers' Web properties during the Super Bowl.
"All the advertisers had obviously prepared for higher traffic; almost all of them were using CDNs to help handle spikes," Grubin said. "Response times were only partly dependent on the network. Times varied more depending on who relied on third-party services with Facebook Like buttons and other social network tie-ins, and how heavy the site itself was. The ones with lots of scripts to drive the interoperability, a lot of objects to load before the page displays, and heavy-duty graphics didn't do so well," Grubin said. "That combination can be deadly."
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Most specifically, sites for Doritos, Coca Cola and Universal Studios were consistently the worst among advertisers, who paid an average of $4 million for every 30-second TV spot.
Compuware's Web performance monitoring shows the three best- and three worst-performing websites during the Super Bowl based on response times. Source: Compuware APM
"Coke's average response time was about 10 seconds, but that includes an hour before the game and an hour after," Grubin said. "Right after the ad aired, response times blasted to between 20 and 35 seconds, and some up to a minute. People won't wait that long for a response."
It can also cause companies' sites to lose out on serendipitous opportunities.
"There was a long blackout during the game, which some companies used as an opportunity to drive more traffic to their sites," Johnson said. "And many connected users evidently had some idle time in the middle of the broadcast to go on Facebook and Twitter and talk about the game and the ads or whatever."
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