An unexpected theme of this year's Super Bowl ads: tech glitches

• The big game proved to be a big tech fail for two prominent Super Bowl advertisers.
• Mr Beast and Salesforce's big game contest had signup delays, while AI.com's website crashed.
• Elsewhere, some Kalshi transfers were delayed due to Super Bowl traffic.

A Super Bowl ad is meant to serve as a victory lap for tech companies. But on advertising's biggest night of the year, some brands were undone by the very thing they were supposed to be showcasing: technology.

Mr Beast and Salesforce teamed up to offer viewers a $1 million prize if they could be the first to crack clues hidden in a Super Bowl ad, and elsewhere, in an online treasure hunt. However, some hopeful contestants were immediately foiled by delays in receiving their registration emails.

In a message on the contest website, Salesforce said the glitch was caused by an "overwhelming response" to the competition and that it was working with major email providers to resolve the issue.

Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, appeared to be pleased with the ad's performance, writing on X that more than 53 million people visited the campaign's landing page. "Beyond any expectation we could have had," he wrote, adding that Mr Beast is "an absolute genius."

Elsewhere, an ad that ran in the fourth quarter of the game for AI.com — a new platform launched by Crypto.com cofounder Kris Marszalek — invited viewers to visit the website to create a handle and create their own agents. But social media users said that the site was down for a period after the ad aired.

Marszalek had spent $70 million to acquire the AI.com domain, which the deal's broker confirmed to the Financial Times was the highest-known price paid for a domain.

"Insane traffic levels. We prepared for scale, but not for THIS," Marszalek wrote on X. He later wrote that the site was "hitting Google rate limits (which are at their absolute global maximum)." The site was restored shortly afterward.

Site crashes can be a good thing

The stakes are high for Super Bowl advertisers. This year's broadcaster, NBCUniversal, confirmed that the average price to secure 30 seconds of airtime during the game reached $8 million, with some slots fetching $10 million. Then there's the additional investments in talent fees, production, and supporting ads and social activity beyond the TV ad.

As one of the few remaining mass-reach advertising vehicles — 127.7 million viewers tuned in last year, per the ratings company Nielsen — Super Bowl advertisers usually want to go out of their way to avoid mistakes. Sometimes brands can frame apparent tech flops as wins.

Loz Horner, strategy partner at the ad agency Lucky Generals, which had previously produced Super Bowl campaigns for Amazon, said that while site crashes could cause some viewers to question the reliability of a company's tech, last night's glitches will likely play out well for Salesforce and AI.com.

"It builds the sense that this is a good thing that you should sign up for — that's why everyone else is doing it," Horner told Business Insider. "There probably isn't another advertising moment like the Super Bowl where if you run an ad saying, 'do something now,' you need to be ready for tens of millions of responses."

In 2022, Coinbase captured attention with a 60-second Super Bowl TV spot that simply featured a QR code bouncing around the screen like a DVD screensaver. Shortly after airing, Coinbase's app reportedly crashed for some users, while others showed error screens on the landing page. The company chalked it up as a win, saying the ad delivered 20 million hits to a landing page within a minute of it airing. The spot also won the 2022 Super Clio for best Super Bowl ad, an award judged by a jury of advertising experts.

This year, Coinbase went minimal again with a 60-second retro karaoke-machine-style ad that encouraged viewers to sing along to the Backstreet Boys' "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)," before revealing its logo at the very end.

Prediction market platform Kalshi was another company hit by tech glitches during last night's Super Bowl. While the company couldn't advertise during the Super Bowl itself — prediction markets were placed on the NFL's prohibited advertising list last year — Kalshi had been heavily promoting bets related to the big game. However, the company said Sunday evening that some deposits and transfers on its app were delayed because of the high volume of traffic.