Predictions were flying and millions of dollars passed through online Sportsbetting operations as to who would win the 43rd Superbowl title - the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Arizona Cardinals. The Steelers were the favourite but Arizona’s defiance leading up to the big event raised a lot of eyebrows. Could Pittsburgh’s defense shut down the passing game? If so, the Steelers would walk away with another Super Bowl notch in their belt. And so they did!

The Cardinals took the lead by 3 in the final minutes. Then a last minute play by Santanio Holmes, with only 49 seconds left in the game, spurred a touchdown by the Steelers. With just over 30 seconds left, that was all she wrote for the Cardinals.

While the Steelers celebrated their huge 6th Superbowl win, several online advertisers were not quite as jubilant. #1 on the list was Dennys. Their Superbowl advertisement offering a Free Grand Slam breakfast between the hours of 6AM and 2PM resulted in millions of online searches including “where is dennys” and “dennys grand slam”. Surely they must have realized that an offer labelled “FREE” would tilt their traffic scales. But instead of tilting, it totalled the scale! The site responded with a “Connection Interrupted” on Firefox for several minutes, while it tried to reply to the mammoth number of searches from hungry Americans. I later discovered that, after the Dennys commercial ran during the Superbowl, it was the most searched item on Google.

A word of caution for future Superbowl advertisers, be sure to prepare yourself for a massive surge in online traffic. Even if your commercial is cheesy, people will still check out your site, even if just to post comments on their favourite blog about what a waste of money it was.

Visit Dennys to view their Grand Slam offer valid until Tuesday 03 February, 2009.

View the Denny’s Grand Slam commercial here.