TMCnet Feature

The Super Bowl is one of the biggest nights of the year, in television, sports, and commercials. This year, the final three minutes of the game saw a spike with Twitter (News - Alert) users tweeting more than 10,000 tweets per second (TPS), breaking a new record for the most TPS during a sporting event. However, not everyone was talking about the game; a lot of viewers got just as excited about the commercials.

Many companies use the Super Bowl as a major night to expand on their brand and show their best commercials that they have been working on for months. However, if your brand is willing to cough up the millions to have your commercial air during the big game, your website better be prepared for the amount of traffic you are going to receive.

Brands like Coca-Cola, Acura, and film Act of Valor, which all aired numerous commercials during the Super Bowl, all saw an overwhelming amount of users hit the Internet to check out the companies’ websites. Yottaa, a Boston-based website performance company, said these brands failed to accurately prepare for the increased traffic.

The Act of Valor movie website slowed down significantly after airing a trailer for the film during the Super Bowl. Users who tried to view the website to find out information about the movie and re-watch the trailer were stuck sitting on their computers watching the video buffer.

Acura debuted its new and improved NSX vehicle during the game, giving viewers a glance at the car’s ultra-high performance. However, according to Yottaa the same could not be said about the company’s website. “The website crashed directly after its aired commercial. Viewers were left with nothing but a glimpse of the car on the television ad. Most fans weren’t impressed,” said Yottaa

Bob Buffone, Yottaa co-founder and CTO, wrote on the company’s website, “With an ad spend of $3.5 million plus production costs for 30 seconds of a commercial, leaving visitors with a bad experience is not the way to launch a new car,” referring to the Acura disaster.

Yottaa also criticized Coca-Cola, who advertised their brand this year using their famous pair of polar bears as opposing football fans watching the game. “The spiked traffic caused the page to crash immediately. Coke was forced to take the site down for maintenance for a large part of the game. With ads promoting the page on television, this left many visitors confused,” said Yottaa.

Buffone said many companies that were not prepared for the increase of traffic, which in turn meant major drop offs on their websites. “Amazon reports that a 100 millisecond delay on its website equates to a 1 percent drop in revenue.”

Regardless, Yottaa did say there were some winners during the big game, with companies like Kia, Budweiser, Chrysler, and Doritos being more than prepared for the traffic and maintaining their sites’ load time for the entire duration of the game.