Web Sites Suit Up For Super Bowl AdsBy Jay LymanThis story appeared in the January/February 2005 issue of Web Host Industry Review magazine. Click here to subscribe for free.February 25, 2005 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The Super Bowl is the moment for players and coaches to shine in pursuit of football’s highest award. Off the field, however, the game is a similarly pivotal moment for the crowd of sponsors competing to win some attention by aligning themselves with the biggest spectacle in sports. For companies looking to make a splash with their television advertising campaigns, there is no bigger stage than the Super Bowl. A successful Super Bowl ad can be a big play for an advertiser, but dropping the ball during the big game can be an embarrassing gaffe.With one of the largest audiences for any media event, the Super Bowl’s sense of spectacle has spread to advertisers, developing a tradition as the big game for TV spots. In recent years, advertisers have begun cross-promoting their products and services to millions of consumers watching the game with the computer on hand as well, attempting to drive that television audience online. Many have pushed the limits of hosting providers with demands for more features and interaction. And executing those plans on game day is another championship level challenge. If a Super Bowl ad succeeds at luring even a fraction of that television audience online, it can mean millions of viewers suddenly landing on an advertiser’s Web site. And in that first visit, performance is everything. If a site fails to deliver, curious consumers with little attention to spare are left waiting for content to load, and scoffing at brands.Technology and marketing professionals agree that, in supporting such a site, hosts and other service providers must invest their resources wisely, not only adding capacity, but also taking away capacity when appropriate. Testing is critical, and sites must be prepared to deal with a variety of browsers from the likes of Mozilla, Netscape and Opera, in addition to Internet Explorer.While the challenges are great, luckily so are the rewards, and so is technology’s progress. More and more viewers have done their part to enable streaming, software downloads and more with their broadband connections. Nevertheless, with those faster connections and larger bills come greater expectations, and it’s much easier for providers to fumble when dealing with high-speed users that have little patience for delays. Internet performance monitor Keynote Systems has a unique perspective on the success of Super Bowl ads. When it comes to meeting the challenge online, the company points out that success should be measured by performance, rather than the number of hits an offline ad generates.According to Keynote, some advertisers dropped the ball during Super Bowl XXXVII, failing possibly because of inadequate load testing to maintain performance in the face of Super Bowl spikes. Among the underachievers in 2003′s big game were: Cadillac, which did fine until halftime, during which the luxury car maker broke down to as low as 83 percent availability and six-second response times; Universal Pictures’ “The Hulk,” which promised a trailer, but buckled under the load with an average response time of 20 seconds the night of the game; and Philip Morris, which tried to announce its name change, but got smoked by the switchover with availability as low as 37 percent.But the stats were not all skewed against online advertising, says Keynote, as plenty of big players pulled off 100 percent availability during the Super Bowl, including FedEx, Levi Strauss, McDonald’s and Sony.Keynote senior Internet analyst Roopak Patel stresses that advertisers expect a lot when investing millions in the finite marketing opportunity of the Super Bowl ad. According to Patel, advertisers and Web hosts can minimize responsibility and risk by outsourcing such a project to companies that are accustomed to the bursting bowl game. “You don’t have to be in a predicament where you can’t handle unexpected crowds,” Patel says. “It can be a very cost-effective and short-term solution and is something they have limited capital for and don’t want sitting around 11 months out of the year.”Patel cautions, however, that advertising campaign producers and hosting providers also run into problems, particularly around consumer experience, when they outsource something that can be as personal as PC use.”It isn’t just a matter of having additional hardware,” Patel says. “It’s responding in a way your customers are accustomed to, which is a tricky, slippery slope.”Nevertheless, companies can and do find partners that enable them to provide the right experience with the right amount of resources, all of it monitored to ensure the right results.The biggest challenge in planning a Super Bowl Web event may be the planning itself, as the time-tested issues of marketing fantasy and technical reality collide like the offensive and defensive lines on the field.”When you do outsource, you have to plan that ahead of time,” Patel says. “That may make it necessary internally to drive the content quicker than you normally would. There are some challenges.”You have to really be careful to stick to a middle-of-the-road approach [to avoid] content becoming so flashy and so loaded that you’re going to cause problems in the delivery stage. There’s always going to be a tradeoff between the uniqueness and people [an ad] brings and the reliability [of the site].”Patel blames past Super Bowl blunders mainly on inadequate provisioning and planning, adding that companies such as Keynote can be part of agreements to ensure availability and performance.”They just didn’t have a provision for a what-if scenario,” Patel says of Super Bowl failures. “They planned for a crowd of 1X, but what about a crowd of 2X? The multiplier becomes two times, three times, four times [the expected traffic]. That’s where a partner is useful, and they’re expected to deliver. They’re the ones whose feet need to be held to the fire. But the successful companies can do it really well.”Performance enhancement, content compression or distribution providers are all delivering the kind of services that can help a site perform when it is most important, says Patel, adding that many of the problems associated with event advertising online have historically been centered on application servers.”A more dynamic application server gives you more ability to do things on the fly, but you have to realize there will be some latency too.” He stresses that with unique events such as the Super Bowl, even a one percent hit rate can bring in hundreds of thousands of Web users, all of whom want whatever has been promoted right now.”They want instant gratification and the best way to do it is the Web,” Patel said.Experts say event-based advertising online is a requirement of any serious nationwide marketing campaign. And it is serious business for key partners, such as content delivery network operator Akamai, which has been planning their Super Bowl XXXIX site delivery support for months. Akamai’s online marketing solution specialist Rachael Stockton says her company is typically contacted by advertising or marketing companies in charge of campaigns.Stockton says that while Super Bowl ads online used to be a matter mostly of driving and supporting spiky traffic, today’s big bowl ads on the Internet must transcend a URL and provide something that stands out and stands the test of time as the campaigns are analyzed along with the game and its outcome.She echoes some of Patel’s claims, indicating that although a site must be dressed up with Flash promotions, music and screensaver downloads, contests and polls, the most important part is that it perform as simply and as quickly as the television. “It’s about creating a seamless link so what they experience on the Web is like what they experience with TV, which means it’s there when they turn it on,” Stockton says.This means that, in addition to sustaining performance in the face of triple, quadruple or other exponential increases in traffic, the task has to be done with sites that are no longer static pages with links.”The problem of making sure the site is up with large numbers still exists,” she says. “But what we’re keeping up and the places we’re driving customers to has totally changed, and that requires back end support and expertise too.”Last year, Mitsubishi Motors’ big Super Bowl ad saw the company’s cars wildly thrown out of fast-moving trucks, and television viewers were told to go online to see what happened. The site got 31 million visitors during the Super Bowl and earned even more hits, and hype, afterward. Not only did Akamai help stream the commercial, but the same site also included a dealer locator feature integrated with mapping technology to take users to the right lot.”What people are doing has really taken a leap forward,” Stockton says.It seems the challenges, however, have remained largely the same, as Stockton alludes to the same issues of marketing dream versus technical reality as Patel.”Marketers have a very short period of time to launch these things,” she says. “IT may not have time to meet the marketing need.”But she agrees that the benefits of broadband and other technology progress have made the Web an essential part of the Super Bowl advertiser’s playbook. Stockton says there is now recognition that the best place to take consumers beyond the television ad is the Web ad, which has become attractive to almost all companies.”I think the Web is becoming much more of a tangible medium for people,” Stockton said. “The most lucrative demographic in advertising is males 18-34, and they are also the largest group of broadband adopters. So it makes sense driving people to a Web site, because that’s where they are.”
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