• by Masha Geller , January 30, 2003

Gator the company may be shrouded in controversy (and please don’t get me started on the subject), but Gator’s evaluation of the effectiveness of two of Super Bowl's major sponsors, Pepsi and Cadillac, on SuperBowl.com is worth reporting. The company’s Feedback Research division conducted a survey of users' online behavior before, during, and after the game, to gauge advertising responsiveness and awareness of the site's primary sponsors.

According to the release, almost 250,000 Gator users visited SuperBowl.com on Sunday and approximately 800 took part in the survey.

The results? Gator said that 13% of SuperBowl.com's viewers clicked on Cadillac's full-page interstitial. In addition, aided recall of their sponsorship of SuperBowl.com was 47% (24% unaided recall.) Cadillac's sponsorship also demonstrated value when thousands of Gator's users directly typed in www.cadillac.com within an hour of viewing the site. Gator says that on Sunday, 61% of Cadillac's clicks came during the game, and 17% came after the game was over.

As for Pepsi, aided recall of Pepsi's sponsorship of SuperBowl.com was 51% (35% unaided recall.) Pepsi saw similar click results, with 40% of clicks occurring during the game, and 17% afterwards.

It’s quite clear that both sponsors saw value in their sponsorships and judging by the above recall stats, at least for these two, advertising during the biggest sporting event of the year was worth it.

Incidentally, Gator found that 24% of Super Bowl Internet users used the Internet during the game. Also, 61% of Super Bowl Internet users liked the ads as much as the game and 20% said they liked the TV ads more than the game.