Super Bowl Ad Winners And Losers

The Super Bowl is over, and advertisers were probably happy to hear that
more than 90 million viewers tuned in. The Indianapolis Colts weren’t the only winners that day. And Bears quarterback Rex Grossman had some commercial company in the gaffe arena.

Certainly Super Bowl broadcaster CBS cashed in. This year,
advertisers paid as much as $2.6 million for a 30-second spot. Some
numbers from the Web suggest that advertisers, banking on the spots to kick
off viral Internet campaigns, got their money’s worth.

According to Akamai Technologies, a Web services provider that
delivered the Web sites for a majority of the Super Bowl advertisers,
traffic to advertiser sites jumped from around 80,000 visitors per
minute for the two to three weeks before the game to around 160,000 visitors
per minute during most of the game.

The numbers, which come from an aggregate of Akamai customer sites
including Anheuser-Busch, GoDaddy.com and Garmin, showed that the
largest spike came during the last 15 minutes of the game, where
traffic jumped to 282,546 visitors per minute. On Monday morning, the
sites saw close to 300,000 visitors per minute.

According to Yahoo, searches for “Bud Light” and “Bud Light
Commercial” increased 205 percent.

But despite those gains, some suggested advertisers committed gaffes
akin to Grossman’s pair of late, game-deciding interceptions.

A report from Reprise Media said that while 58 percent of advertisers
bought placement in paid search against their brand name, 75 percent
of companies didn’t integrate any recognizable elements from their TV
commercials into their search ads.

The study, which did not include alcohol advertisers due to legal
restrictions placed upon their search marketing activity, also
pointed out that while most TV commercials included a URL, nearly 90
percent lacked a specific call to action asking users to go there.

Yahoo vice president Anne Frisbie said advertisers could take better
advantage of the Super Bowl’s huge audience with better coordination
between search and television marketing.

“In some cases, it seemed that the search marketing teams may not have
seen the TV ads in advance,” Frisbie said in a statement. “For example, GM had very strong search campaigns in place, but could have gone a step further in closing the loop with consumers by bidding on terms prominent in the TV ads, such as American Revolution or GM Warranty.