It seemed like the perfect setup, one that would help an IT department change from a cost center to an investment center.
Wait, what am I talking about? Why, Coca-Cola's Super Bowl ad -- the one that had the cowboys, showgirls, and badlanders racing through the desert to get the big bottle of Coke. Here's the video:
Customers who went to CokeChase.com could vote on which team they wanted to win and also sabotage the other teams. After the game, Coke would show one of three pre-shot videos featuring the winner. By going to the website, users could influence the outcome. Coke would use every trick in the book to maximize tweets, shares, +1s, and every other kind of social media and PR attention. Why, this was interactive TV at it's best!
Or, at least, it was supposed to be.
Because within 15 minutes of the ad running on international television, the website was down.
What actually happened
I didn't go to the website, but I did see this tweet from my friend Mike Lyles, a respected QA program manager for a Fortune 100 company:
That's right. Roughly 108 million people watched Super Bowl XLVII, where they were directed to a website that did not do anything. When I checked, 10 minutes after the tweet, all I saw was the background of the cola bottle on a desert. Half an hour after that, the site showed a "This site is undergoing scheduled maintenance" message.
So much for the dramatic opportunity for IT to become an investment center, the kind of thing you want to throw money at, because every dollar you put in leads to 10 dollars coming out.
Instead, the IT department blew it.
The problem
"Performance testing" a Super Bowl ad is not as easy as it sounds. No one has any idea how much traffic the site will take or, if the application has any complexity, how exactly customers will use the site. And that is assuming that all the users of the site are benign and planning to use the application as intended. So you do the best you can.
Looking at the site, it appears to be a very small amount of static content that is calling backend services to generate the web page you see. Perhaps the web servers were tested, and stayed up, but the API backend was not?
For that matter, it is possible the problem wasn't Coke at all, but a third party it relied on heavily. About an hour after the Coke debacle, the power went out for the entire stadium -- then Twitter went down.
It was a bad day for IT all around.
Here comes the sun
On the plus side, the Coca-Cola folks did a lot right. They spent the $4 million to create an ad well -- by not only showing the product, but asking the customer to engage, then giving a way for that engagement to create a multiplier effect. And, while interactive TV is not really new (The A-Team did a dial-in to vote on the outcome 25 years ago), the integration with social media is.
My prediction? Companies will want to continue to combine video, voting, and social media in real-time. That's going to be hard. People will get it wrong.
For those of us in the business of reducing risk in technology or willing to at least roll up our sleeves, that combination means opportunity. That's our position, at least.
But let me ask you this: The Coke site goes down. Every journalist, every blogger, and every 16-year-old with a smartphone is now talking about Coca-Cola. Is it possible that "there is no such thing as bad publicity" holds, and Coke gets more free PR from this than it would have by playing the ads straight?
Answer that question, my friends, in a real, objective way, and suddenly, we may find ourselves in an entirely different ballgame.
— Matt Heusser is principal consultant of Excelon Development.
I have seen talk about the perceived racial issues the add drew, and personally I thought it was rediculous. I saw the commercial, and I did not see anything I thought could be perceived as racism. I was actually surprised when I saw the chatter on Facebook. I am also surprised someone didn't complain that the commercial was sexist, since the ladies won the race.....I guess that would have only been an issue if the cowboys or badlanders had won....
or is this like the people who deliberately plan an event for too small a room in order to make their event look more popular?
The other problem with this ad is that it was a bit too hip for the room. People are going, oh, showgirls, oh, there's showgirls, there's soldiers, etc. It looked to me like they were referencing movies -- Priscilla Queen of the Desert, The Road Warrior, and I forget the other one though I recognized it at the time. But the average Super Bowl person is not going to have recognized them.
I like the product well enough, but I can't imagine why I'd become the fan or follower of a soft drink. Not even Moutain Dew. Sorry, Mitch, Diet Mountain Dew.
syedzunair - It is in human nature to make mistakes but that same nature also teaches us to learn from them.
The world has been doing business on the Internet for almost 20 years now. That's more than enough time for companies to learn to keep adequate web capacity without having to learn that lesson the hard way.
Coke has a HUGE fan following and it was able to come out of this as the champion because of that loyal following. It it were a brand with a lesser following or one that did not occupy the premier position in the consumers minds the results would have been different.
It is in human nature to make mistakes but that same nature also teaches us to learn from them. Mistakes will be made but what is important is that if you learn from those mistakes or not. Secondly, mistakes can be prevented by training the users and enabling them to work efficiently.
"Well, as they saw, any publicity, even the bad kind, is good publicity. It's a shame Coke's IT team failed so badly in that department. It's like they threw away millions of advertising dollars because they couldn't keep the site up or make it work. Epic fail right here."
Rightly said stotheco..but I believe that Coke is fortunate enough when it comes to customers' loyalty... No matter what the coke will do, this brand will always remain consumers' favourite
soft drink brand as it has been serving them marvelously since decades.
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