So I did not actually watch the Super Bowl for the football. I mean I watched some of the football, Eli Manning is clearly having a moment and that last drive was genuinely tense, 21-17 Giants over the Patriots, fine, good game. But lets be honest, by year four or five of doing this blog you start watching the Super Bowl the way I watch it now, which is with a laptop open and one eye on the ads and the other eye on Twitter completely falling over.
And Twitter did fall over, or close to it. They're reporting 12,233 tweets per second at the peak, which happened right at the end when the Patriots' last-gasp Hail Mary fell incomplete in the end zone. Ten thousand a second sustained for basically the whole last three minutes. Madonna's halftime show alone pushed something like 10,245 a second during her segment. I dont know how you even process numbers like that in real time without the whole system falling over, and I say that as someone who once watched a WordPress install choke on maybe 40 people hitting refresh at once during a giveaway. Different scale obviously but still, respect to whoever was on call at Twitter last night.
The ad that everyone is going to be talking about today is GoDaddy's, and not for a reason I love. They ran the "Body Paint" spot with Jillian Michaels and Danica Patrick, which is the same GoDaddy playbook they've been running since basically the dawn of the format, and then a second one called "Cloud" that had an actual QR code baked into the commercial so people could scan it with their phones mid-broadcast. I tried it. It did not work on the first attempt, or the second, my phone's camera app just sat there confused while the ad had already cut to something else by the time it focused. QR codes on a thirty second national broadcast still strikes me as optimistic design, you're asking someone to whip out their phone, open a barcode scanner app most people forgot they installed, hold steady, and do it all before the spot ends. GoDaddy is apparently claiming record traffic and passed ten million customers during the broadcast so clearly enough people made it work, I just wasnt one of them.
Also can we talk about M.I.A. for a second, because that was not on my bingo card for last night. During Madonna's halftime performance, right in the middle of "Give Me All Your Luvin," M.I.A. throws up her middle finger straight at the camera on live network television in front of what's apparently the largest halftime audience ever recorded. NBC didnt catch it in time to cut away or blur it, and this morning they've already put out an apology. I have no real opinion on M.I.A. as an artist honestly, I just think its funny that the most talked about "malfunction" moment from a Super Bowl halftime show doesnt even involve wardrobe this time, it's a hand gesture, and somehow that still generated more real-time chatter than the actual football.
Anyway none of this is deep analysis, I dont have a grand theory about what any of it means for the ad industry or social media or whatever. I just think its kind of remarkable that a football game has quietly become one of the biggest single-day stress tests for internet infrastructure that exists, bigger than most planned launches, bigger than most breaking news events, and it happens on a random Sunday in February every single year like clockwork. Akamai was reportedly tracking traffic spikes tied directly to specific commercials airing, which is a wild thing to have dashboards for. Somewhere there's a team that spends eleven months a year getting ready for one Sunday night.
I did not scan the QR code successfully. I did eat an entire sleeve of crackers by myself during the second quarter. Both things happened last night and only one of them is going in the post title.