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is almost better than the game
Computer.com bet it all on one spot--and won
By Jeremy Schlosberg
After all the hype and hysteria, here's a Super Bowl advertising story of fortune and glory, of exquisite timing and outrageous luck.
It's the story of Computer.com. Never heard of it? Neither had we, nor for that matter millions of Americans, until Super Bowl Sunday.
Computer.com didn't really exist until its Super Bowl ad ran. The company literally opened for business that day.
Not only that, the two founders took an ad in a high-risk position, and as luck would have it, the ad ran at one of the most exciting moments in the game, indeed at one of the most exciting moments in Super Bowl history.
Though a long shot, Computer.com's single ad became one of the most widely watched commercials in TV history.
It's a story of two guys who bet everything on one moment. Hollywood couldn't have written it; it's too preposterous.
While all 17 dot.coms that advertised during the Super Bowl sort through their data to see what sort of concrete impact the commercials had on their traffic, few if any had as much at stake on their ad as Computer.com.
And while the initial numbers the companies have released are a bit hard to analyze since web sites are free to present the data however they want to (see chart), it may well be that Computer.com’s ad had the biggest impact of any shown in the game.
The company estimates it had 5 million hits and 500,000 visitors between the airing of the ad Sunday night at around 9:30 and Tuesday afternoon.
At its peak during and after the ad, the site was registering some 2,200 hits per second.
Computer.com is a web site aimed at novice computer users--"soccer moms, seniors and kids," as the company likes to say.
The company was launched when Mike Zapolin and Mike Ford bought the domain name from a hobbyist in California. This was back in May. It operated out of Ford’s garage in Acton, Mass., until October.
In December the company received $5.8 million of seed funding from private investors.
It promptly announced that it would spend more than half of this money--$3 million--on television advertising during the Super Bowl.
Looking to get the most exposure for its money, co-founders Zapolin and Ford chose to advertise two times during the pre-game show and once during the game itself.
Given a choice of six slots, the fledgling company chose one of the Super Bowl’s lower-rent positions—the commercial that airs during the two-minute warning time-out near the end of the game.
Smart choice. As many Americans are aware by now, this particular Super Bowl happened to be tied with two minutes left in the game.
Just 12 seconds before the two-minute warning, Tennessee had engineered an unexpected comeback to tie the game at 16-16 with a field goal. St. Louis was just getting the ball back to see what it could do in response.
Then the clock stopped. Two-minute warning. Millions and millions of nail-biting Americans were taken from the Georgia Dome directly to a commercial for Computer.com.
The commercial itself was a moderately humorous, vignette-y thing, featuring co-founders Zapolin and Ford themselves.
"Because of what was happening, we ended up playing to a 48 rating," says Ford. Those commercials that ran early in the game played by contrast to a 39 rating.
"That made us one of the most-watched commercials in the game, if not in Super Bowl history." (Ford by the way was guy on the right in the ad who snorted.)
The two-minute warning placement had been a calculated risk at best.
Zapolin and Ford had figured that even if the game was a typical Super Bowl game and no one’s paying much attention by the end--well, even then there are still lots of people in front of the television. Somebody’s going to notice them.
As it turned out, an unfathomable horde--the mass market itself as it nearly doesn’t exist anymore--saw the commercial.
"It was really amazing," says Ford. "Not only how many people ended up coming to our site as a result of the commercial, but how many people came online during the ad itself."
Despite the tense goings-on in the game, people hit the web site fast and furiously, with hits quickly reaching 2,200 per-second.
So never mind all the professional and amateur critiquing of this year’s batch of Super Bowl ads. In an informal MSNBC poll, for example, the Computer.com ad was chosen as best by only 1 percent of voters, with nearly 14,000 votes in by late Tuesday.
And never mind what the numbers end up showing when all the sites that feel up to it release their traffic figures. For that matter, never mind the St. Louis Rams.
The real winner of Super Bowl XXXIV may well have been Computer.com.
How Super Bowl
dot.coms have fared
*cumulative, as of Tuesday |
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Jeremy Schlosberg is the senior editor for new media.