Online Bowl blitz

NEW YORK — You don't have to be a football player to be a part of the action on Super Bowl Sunday.

Coca-Cola is asking people to vote for an online match between three groups competing in a desert for a Coke on Game Day. Pepsi and Toyota are using viewers' photos in their ads. Audi let people choose the end of its Super Bowl ad, while Lincoln based its spot on more than 6,000 tweets from fans about their road trips.

These are only some of the ways advertisers found to get viewers involved in the excitement on Game Day by luring them online. And they're going well beyond encouraging fans to tweet or like their ads on websites such as Facebook.

They're trying to get the most of their Super Bowl ads, which cost nearly $4 million for a 30-second spot, by drawing people online. Companies that advertise during the Super Bowl get a 20 percent increase in Web traffic on the day of the game, according to the analytics arm of software maker Adobe. They also have a higher online audience than average in the week after.

We're seeing better and more unique ways of getting people involved, said Robert Kolt, an advertising instructor at Michigan State University. You want people to be engaged.

PepsiCo, which is sponsoring the Super Bowl halftime show, said its goal was to create buzz online with a monthlong campaign that went well beyond a voiceover saying brought to you by Pepsi.

For about two weeks, Pepsi asked fans online and via a digital billboard in New York's Times Square to submit their photos for a chance to appear in a 30-second intro spot to air right before the halftime show.

The company said the effort was more popular than it expected: Pepsi expected to get 2,000 photos, but got 100,000 instead. About 1,000 photos were chosen to be a part of the intro. They will be stitched together in a flipbook style video that appears to show one person jumping to the tune of Countdown, a song by Beyoncé, who is performing during the halftime show.

We don't just want (viewers) on pepsi.com, we want them telling their friends ‘I just did something with Pepsi,'  said Angelique Krembs, vice president of trademark Pepsi marketing. You want the friend to tell the friend about Pepsi. You don't want Pepsi to always be the one talking about Pepsi.