Coke tried to make its mark on this year's Super Bowl with an interactive commercial, but things did not go as planned.
The commercial showed three groups (showgirls, cowboys and "badlanders") racing through the desert towards a giant bottle of Coke. The first part of the commercial was shown early on, and viewers were meant to go to Coke's website and vote for which group they wanted to win. The entire journey would then be shown in a long commercial after the Super Bowl, revealing the winner.
The interactive commercial would have been pretty exciting, but Coke's website went down just as viewers were trying to cast the first votes, Mashable reports.
Coke's commercial sparked controversy before the website even went down. When the first part of the commercial was released, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee criticized the commercial, saying that it showed Arabs in an unflattering light. The first part of the commercial shows an Arab man with a camel looking at the large Coke bottle longingly, but viewers were not allowed to vote for him to win the race. Coca-Cola has apologized.
Not all interactive Super Bowl commercials failed. Oreo's commercial that urged viewers to chose which part of the cookie they prefer (cookie or creme) on Instagram was a crowd pleaser, earning he cookie thousands of Instagram followers, Mashable also noted. The commercial's success was buoyed by some quick thinking by the cookie maker (and its ad agency), which also released its "You Can Still Dunk In The Dark" ad on Twitter minutes after a power outage at the Superdome, Buzzfeed reported.
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