Who Won the Advertising Super Bowl?
(RTM note - this does not involve toys, but was fascinating enough to share because viewing the advertising in question is a shared national experience.)
Who Won the Advertising Super Bowl? Keynote Reports on Who Scored and Who Fumbled
- Retailers and Automakers Impress
- Coke Chokes, As Does Century 21 (on Mobile)
- Smartphones Remain the Greatest Challenge, Though Some Still Struggle with Desktop and Tablet Performance
SAN MATEO, CALIF. – FEBRUARY 4, 2013 - Keynote® (NASDAQ: KEYN), the global leader in Internet and mobile cloud testing and monitoring, announces the winners and losers from Sunday's Super Bowl advertisers, measuring their Web performance across desktop, tablet and smartphone screens.
For the first time, Keynote measured Super Bowl advertisers' websites before, during and after the Super Bowl to see how they fared in speed and reliability once the traffic started hitting.
The good news: most retailers and automakers exhibited strong performance, delivering within industry best practices across the three screens. Maybe all those Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays have put them through their paces? The winners in each category were: GoDaddy (desktop); Axe (tablet); and BestBuy (Smartphone).
The bad news: some of the major consumer packaged-goods names, notably Coca-Cola with its heavily promoted "Coke Chase" campaign, showed unacceptably slow response times on mobile devices and even desktops. From 5:00pm to 9:00pm PST, the Coca-Cola site crashed repeatedly for consumers trying to access it on mobile devices and laptops. During that time period Keynote measurements showed that the Coca-Cola smartphone site was completely unavailable, and more than 70% of visitors to the desktop site were turned away. For those that did reach the site, it took almost 15 seconds to respond, making it the worst performer in that category.
Century 21 placed last in the smartphone category with a staggering 54 seconds response time. Doritos took the bottom spot in the tablet category with a response time of just over 17 seconds.
Overall there were some unimpressive mobile numbers – 11 advertisers came in with over 15 second response times (Century 21, Doritos, Hyundai and Kia, Mio from Kraft Foods, Pepsi, RIM/Blackberry, Samsung (an astounding 36 seconds from the smartphone maker), Sodastream, Walt Disney Pictures for Oz (40 seconds) and Wonderful Pistachios.
"Given the money spent and the high-profile brands promoted, we were surprised to see how poor some of these numbers are," comments Nick Halsey, chief marketing officer at Keynote. "Clearly the next challenge for these multi-channel campaigns is to better prepare for the three-screen delivery model; testing, monitoring and load testing end user experience prior to special events and to assure day-to-day performance are mission-critical. It's not enough to simply hope the desktop site will run on a mobile device, particularly when some of the content is rich video and animation."
Methodology
Keynote used the following methodology to measure website performance:
Web/Desktop – Measurements were made from 10 U.S. locations every 30 minutes using a real Internet Explorer 9 browser; Tablet - Measurements ran over Mobile Web Perspective® every 30 minutes from New York and San Francisco on the iPad 2. (Keynote chose the iPad running over a LAN option as this is how the majority of iPad users access the Internet, so this reflects most common scenario); Mobile (Smartphone) - Measurements ran every 60 minutes over the air from New York and San Francisco on iPhone 4S (San Francisco – Verizon OTA, New York – Sprint OTA).
About Keynote
Keynote (NASDAQ:KEYN) is the global leader in Internet and mobile cloud testing & monitoring. Keynote maintains the world's largest on-demand performance monitoring and testing infrastructure for Web and mobile sites comprised of over 7,000 measurement computers and mobile devices in over 275 locations around the world that enable companies to continuously improve the online and mobile experience. Known as 'The Mobile and Internet Performance Authority™,' Keynote offers three market-leading product platforms:
Keynote Perspective® provides on-demand performance monitoring for enterprise web and mobile sites including online portals, e-commerce sites and B2B sites. Over 2,000 customers rely on Keynote Perspective services to know precisely how their websites, content, and applications perform on actual browsers, networks, and mobile devices.
Keynote DeviceAnywhere® provides the industry's only true cloud-based platform for testing and monitoring the functionality, usability, performance and availability of mobile applications and websites. It's suite of mobile testing solutions is used by over 1,000 mobile developers and enterprises to deliver quality mobile applications and services to the mobile channel.
Keynote SIGOS® offers active end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) testing and monitoring solutions for mobile, fixed and VoIP communications. Its SITE and Global Roamer products are used by over 200 network operators, content providers, carriers and regulators in over 100 countries worldwide.
Keynote's 4,000 customers represent top Internet and mobile companies and include American Express, AT&T, Disney, eBay, E*TRADE, Expedia, Google, Microsoft, SonyEricsson, T-Mobile and Vodafone. Keynote Systems, Inc. is headquartered in San Mateo, California and can be reached at http://www.keynote.com/ or by phone in the U.S. at 1-800-KEYNOTE.
The trademarks or registered trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc. in the United States and other countries include Keynote®, DataPulse®, Keynote Customer Experience Rankings®, Perspective®, Keynote Red Alert®, Keynote WebEffective®, The Internet Performance Authority®, MyKeynote®, SIGOS®, SITE®, keynote® The Mobile & Internet Performance Authority™, Keynote FlexUse®, Keynote DeviceAnywhere®, Keynote DeviceAnywhere Test Center®, Keynote DemoAnywhere® and Keynote MonitorAnywhere® All related trademarks, trade names, logos, characters, design and trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc. in the United States and other countries and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.