Super Bowl Ads: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Funny how the Super Bowl interaction with the web differed so much from the recent inauguration. Twitter which had doubled its capacities for the Obama Inauguration day – well supposedly – it was relatively quiet throughout with occasional comments on the ads.

Voting on the ads was everywhere and popularity lists abound now.

Doritos was a clear winner and their web site was ready and they had more video/ads on YouTube… all in all an intelligent online awareness.

Dennys.com, on the otherhand, is the real story. Spend $3 million to offer the United States a free breakfast and have your web site crash? As Michael Grey suggested last night maybe it was done for the viral guarantee today.

The crew over at Reprise Media did their annual review of full on web initiatives – pregame work, ad message and follow up in all areas are looked at. eTrade and Cash4Gold got top marks – was not big on that one or the koala hitting Career Builder (but maybe that’s just personal).

Reprise did single out Dennys too:

“Dennyâ’s had a terrible night, with a free breakfast promo that failed to include a URL in their TV ad or an online call to action. Perhaps they were hoping to avoid overloading their website – which crashed right after the ad aired and was down for the rest of the game”

Regardless of the viral uptake – there will be hordes of the Undead – no wait a minute the Unplugged – crowding the counters and tables this Tuesday at Denny’s across the US. Hell in a city with many of the restaurants you could eat until you explode hopping from one to the other between 6am and 2 pm tomorrow eating free Grand Slams.

Matt Cutts has to weigh in on the biggest link buy in history. My hat is tipped to the people in charge of this entire strategy. The whole thing has played out better than Dennys could have possibly hoped for. They now are ranked number one for free breakfast. But it is an interesting listing – tops in Google for organic and paid search – yet no where in Yahoo or MSN! That includes PPC.

So is Dennys saying we Google breakfast? Or did they like many people just go for a Google advertising approach? Why no lift in Yahoo or MSN organic? We should at least see how long the links take to lift the site to number one on those two engines. Is there insight into Google manipulation even if it is short lived?

Matt there has to be something going on here. Does buying the country a meal give you permanent placement for free breakfast? Interestingly not on the front page anywhere organically for just breakfast and PPC for that matter (good negativing expanded match or is it a phrase match campaign).

Should be a campaign to tell all homeless – and computerless – people about the food option.

Meanwhile you knew there had to be some porn hack out there somewhere. Arizona got porn-rolled.