Super Bowl’s Fifth Quarter: Online Traffic For Ads Matches The Hype — Even If The Ads Didn’t

Press releases and reports have been trickling in all day about Super Bowl ad-related traffic. A few of the most interesting:
— Akamai, which handles online traffic for 21 of the 35 in-game advertisers, reported 300,000 visitors a minute to those sites by noon Monday, up 85 percent.
— AOL says it delivered more than 15 million SB ad streams and its ad poll had more than 250,000 votes. (The Blockbuster “Mouse” beat out A-B’s faux “Dalmation.”)
— MSN drew more than 246,000 votes for ads shown at FoxSports.com and MSNVIdeo.com.
AdAge.com p[icks up a RepriseMedia report that shows some marketers blew it by not buying search terms. Searching for “Doritos super bowl ad” brought sponsored links from YouTube and CBS Sportsline, not the Doritos’ micro-site for the user-gen ad. Top search performers included intentionally cheesy salesgenie.com spot. Using paid search, Pizza Hut sent people to a branded site on YouTube instead of its corporate site.
— Bud Light is sponsoring the streaming ads at USAToday.com so it’s a win-win for A-B. Once started, the ads run whether anyone’s watching or not. Tech ads did so-so on the famed USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter: the Blockbuster “Mouse” was the highest at #11; CareerBuilder.com place #16, #27, #28; the Sprint “connectile dysfunction” was #40; salesgenie.com was dead last.
SearchEngineWatch picked up on a relative lack of URLs.
— TiVo, which offered its subscribers the ability to download Super Bowl commercials for the first time, sampled 10,000 households and looked at how users viewed those ads as well.
— Snickers yanked its ad and alternate endings from its site after complaints that it was homophobic.
— The three ads getting the most buzz were also those displayed before the game including the K-Fed nationwide spot, says the NYT. Peter Blackshaw, CMO, Nielsen BuzzMetrics: “The Web is all about diffusion of information, where nothing is a secret. You could say the Super Bowl has caught up with the Web. … The name of the game next year (will be) priming the attention, not making consumers wait for the ‘magic door’ to open.”
YouTube has a complicated competition going on that involves ranking commercials during rounds. There’s also a straight gallery where the leading ad — Bud Light’s wedding auctioneer — had 43, 620 votes Monday night.
Related:
Where To Watch Superbowl Ads Online

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