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web attraction too
Traffic rose 'til kickoff and then again during game
By Marty Beard
Super Bowl XXXVI will be remembered mainly for the New England Patriots’ last-minute field goal that brought them a squeaker of a victory over the St. Louis Rams.
But besides having been a genuinely gripping football game, it will also be remembered as a time that television and the internet took baby steps toward convergence, both for the advertisers and for the broadcasters of the game.
"Television and the web have come to understand what each does best, building what I’ve called ‘poor man’s convergence,’" says Nielsen//NetRatings analyst Allen Weiner.
"Each takes on the distinguishing role that it does best and tries while they’re still in separate boxes to take advantage of some sort of interrelationship."
According to Nielsen//NetRatings and Jupiter Media Metrix, internet traffic on Sunday correlated with what was happening during the broadcast of the game, with the game driving traffic to affiliated web sites.
People logged on to participate in polls as directed by messages and announcers, in addition to looking up player bios and such.
On Sunday, traffic to SuperBowl.com reached 904,000 unique visitors, up 761 percent from the day before, says Nielsen//NetRatings.
NFL.com, the web site of the National Football League, attracted 544,000 unique visitors on Sunday, up 269 percent from Saturday.
A feature that let fans vote on coaches’ calls helped drive people to FoxSports.Lycos.com; 166,000 unique visitors hit the site on Sunday. Additionally, many people logged onto SuperBowl.com to vote for the game’s most valuable player.
Jupiter Media Metrix logged even higher numbers, reporting that SuperBowl.com got 195,000 unique visitors on Saturday and 1.2 million on Sunday, and that NFL.com drew 378,000 visitors on Saturday and 1.4 million on game day.
Traffic to the three sites mounted all day until kickoff time, when the number of visitors fell, then jumped once the game got underway.
The phenomenon extended to advertisers, too.
While industry observers generally agree that this year people were taking their bathroom breaks during the commercials instead of the game, advertisers’ web sites all posted appreciable gains in traffic compared to the previous day.
"This very well may be remembered as the year where the original reason people are tuning into the Super Bowl--i.e. let’s watch a football game--turned out to be the real draw and the real excitement," says Jupiter Media Metrix analyst Charles Buchwalter.
Still, the convergence between TV ads and web sites could be a lot stronger. There are an estimated 143 million Americans with internet access, and it doesn’t look like they were all watching the game. And if they were, not a lot of them were visiting advertisers’ web sites.
AT&T’s enigmatic mlife.com spots were in many ways the most notable, although not because they were especially amusing or engaging; users on iFilm.com rated the Budweiser, M&M and Visa spots the highest.
AT&T didn’t reveal what mlife.com was until its final ad. Judging from the creative, it could have been anything from a dating service to an insurance company. AT&T displayed nothing but the web address, clearly hoping that people would log on and find out.
"They obviously took the approach of being somewhat mysterious and putting out an ad that they knew would make people ask a lot of questions," says Buchwalter. "From a cross-media standpoint, they very much wanted people to go to the web to find out more information."
The gimmick worked, more or less, as 681,000 people visited the web site, up 1,903 percent from Saturday. The site had no visitors at all before the weekend, suggesting that the launch of the new brand for AT&T wireless services was successful.
Still, whether or not the mlife.com campaign was a success isn’t clear. For starters, the site was overwhelmed with visitors, to the extent that many curious football fans with handy web access couldn’t call it up.
Considering that 86.8 million people tuned into the game, 681,000 doesn’t look like a very big number, and no one knows if the brand, or the heavy traffic, will stick.
"I wouldn’t go all the way to say it was an unqualified success," Buchwalter says. "But what you can say is, if their goal was to go to the web site to learn about mlife.com, they succeeded."
Pepsi’s ads, featuring pop performer Britney Spears dolled up in regalia from bygone decades, also attracted a notable amount of web traffic. On the day of the game, Pepsi.yahoo.com drew 135,000 unique visitors, up from virtually none on Saturday.
Some advertisers, notably online bank and investing service Etrade.com and Monster.com, didn’t see a bowl-related spike in traffic at all. Rather, traffic to their sites fell, a happenstance that Jupiter Media Metrix blames on the fact that they ran fewer ads this year than in years past.
|
Hourly Traffic
to Super Bowl-related Web Sites |
|||
| Time of day (EST) |
Unique visitors |
||
|
FoxSports.com |
NFL Internet Group |
Superbowl.com |
|
| 12 a.m.-12:59 a.m |
38,169 |
26,322 |
N/A |
| 1 a.m.-1:59 a.m. |
19,885 |
22,836 |
N/A |
| 2 a.m.-2:59 a.m. |
18,917 |
N/A |
N/A |
| 3 a.m.-3:59 a.m. |
3,222 |
N/A |
N/A |
| 4 a.m.-4:59 a.m. |
10,439 |
N/A |
N/A |
| 5 a.m.-5:59 a.m. |
2,981 |
3,704 |
4,125 |
| 6 a.m.-6:59 a.m. |
N/A |
24,056 |
25,270 |
| 7 a.m.-7:59 a.m. |
21,650 |
10,811 |
6,898 |
| 8 a.m.-8:59 a.m. |
15,281 |
63,628 |
58,662 |
| 9 a.m.-9:59 a.m. |
25,979 |
27,388 |
30,247 |
| 10 a.m.-10:59 a.m. |
56,850 |
49,753 |
32,996 |
| 11 a.m.-11:59 a.m. |
102,267 |
54,972 |
43,982 |
| 12 p.m.-12:59 p.m. |
66,867 |
70,749 |
52,571 |
| 1 p.m.-1:59 p.m. |
134,138 |
99,334 |
56,814 |
| 2 p.m.-2:59 p.m. |
89,472 |
143,661 |
98,879 |
| 3 p.m.-3:59 p.m. |
49,847 |
58,170 |
40,993 |
| 4 p.m.-4:59 p.m. |
68,740 |
162,911 |
143,078 |
| 5 p.m.-5:59 p.m. |
139,066 |
153,799 |
111,659 |
| 6 p.m.-6:59 p.m. |
128,580 |
193,636 |
137,339 |
| 7 p.m.-7:59 p.m. |
129,767 |
237,970 |
167,653 |
| 8 p.m.-8:59 p.m. |
137,968 |
183,848 |
159,443 |
| 9 p.m.-9:59 p.m. |
144,160 |
193,616 |
159,779 |
| 10 p.m.-10:59 p.m. |
184,912 |
199,212 |
129,152 |
| 11 p.m.-11:59 p.m. |
66,688 |
83,081 |
66,299 |
|
Source: Jupiter Media Metrix |
|||
|
Traffic to Super
Bowl Advertisers |
||
| Site |
Unique visitors (000) |
|
|
Saturday |
Sunday |
|
| Etrade.com |
174 |
120 |
| Fedex.com |
75 |
75 |
| HotJobs.com |
360 |
299 |
| Levis.com |
N/A |
N/A |
| Mlife.com |
34 |
681 |
| Monster.com |
652 |
473 |
| Pepsi.yahoo.com |
N/A |
135 |
| Schwab.com |
122 |
60 |
|
Source: Jupiter Media Metrix |
||
February 6, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Marty Beard is a staff writer for Media Life.
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