Dockers Free Pants Super Bowl Ad Backfires – Their Website Can’t Keep Up

Planning to promote your company in a Super Bowl commercial?  Better make sure your website is ready to handle your offer.

Dockers just aired a commercial offering to give away free pants during tonight’s Super Bowl.  Seconds later, their servers were bogging down, not allowing the incoming traffic. For those who were able to reach the website, the security code was rejecting users and spitting out server errors.

Worse – the internet is buzzing with irritated tweets and Facebookers who are miffed that they can’t get the site to work.

This is an example where an expensive advertisement will actually HURT public perception instead of helping it. 

When you plan to run an ad campaign at any level, make sure your web site and infrastructure are ready to handle the load!  Better yet, avoid Super Bowl ads if you’re trying to collect email addresses.  Imagine how much more successful they could have been with a Google AdWords pay-per-click campaign.