Tebow Ad Alarms, Surprises, and Triumphs

I really like what Focus on the Family pulled off with the Tebow ad on television’s biggest stage. It wasn’t what I expected, but after reflecting on the strategy, it was a great “head fake” that produced unbelievable interest and then really offended no one, showed a sense of humor, and drove people to the Website for deeper messages on life and family (and the full Tebow story).

Focus’s site got 500,000 hits and 50,000 unique visitors in the hour the ad aired.

But the impact kept growing:

Focus spokesman Gary Schneeberger said:

"For Sunday and Monday only, we had 1.16 million unique visitors, which is eighteen times our normal traffic," he says. "And we had 8.6 million terabytes streamed. I don't know what that means [a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes], but that's apparently 267 times more than we normally have. The full interview with the Tebows that's mentioned at the end of the ad had been watched a total of 762,897 times as of yesterday, and the ad on our website had been watched 305,000 times -- and that's not counting the number of views on other websites. I just saw a link on Yahoo!, which had posted the ad, and it had been viewed on their website over 1.1 million times."

--Jim Jewell