How ADWEEK Achieved 100% Site Uptime During the 2025 Super Bowl 

Founded in 1979 and based in New York City, ADWEEK is the leading source of news and insights for marketing, advertising, and technology professionals in the brand marketing ecosystem, reaching “more than 6 million marketing wizards” across digital, print, events, podcasts, newsletters, social media, and mobile channels.

Their audience consumes everything from creativity and brand marketing coverage to news about agency movers and shakers to trends in convergent TV, tech, platforms, AI, and sports marketing.

The Super Bowl is ADWEEK’s Super Bowl. 

It’s the publisher’s biggest day, night, and week of the year all rolled into one when their journalists pump out “instant replay” color commentary in real time about every ad as it airs. 

ADWEEK doesn’t stop there. They also publish exclusive in-depth reporting and op-eds from big-name creatives so they can “own the Monday morning water cooler conversation” and long-tail audience engagement long after the final game whistle sounds. 

But after seeing their legacy CMS platform fumble their 2024 Super Bowl coverage, ADWEEK decided to call a timeout and adopt a new CMS playbook.

THE CHALLENGE

Making sure ADWEEK.com was ready on Game Day

For the Super Bowl, ADWEEK’s web properties have to be available, performant, and ready to scale to meet the surge in traffic as visitors flock to their famed ad tracker, live blog, and site pages, which serve up on-the-spot hot takes on every commercial as it airs.

With all that on the line, ADWEEK knew they had to up their Super Bowl game for 2025.

They migrated to WordPress VIP in May 2024 (they’d been diehard Parse.ly Analytics users since 2017). “Primarily so that we didn’t have to worry about performance during peak times,” said Zoë Ruderman, ADWEEK’s Chief Content Officer, who oversees the Editorial and Product teams.

THE SOLUTION

Picking WordPress VIP as the scalable infrastructure

“Ultimately, we picked VIP in part because we knew we’d see a huge spike around the Super Bowl, and the last thing we wanted to worry about was reliability and the site going down or being slow” said Ruderman.

“I want my teams to be focused on creating the best content possible—and a lot of it on Super Bowl week—and making sure as many people see it as possible.”

The No. 1 reason migrating to WordPress VIP was so appealing was scalability, “a standout point for us,” said Ayesha Corn, ADWEEK’s Director of Project Management. With their prior CMS, “we’d have to ask for more service space to scale up, all additional [cost]. With VIP we don’t have to do that.”

After migrating to WordPress VIP, “we immediately noticed an increase in site performance and speed,” said Corn, “something we’re always looking to improve. And VIP Support has been incredibly responsive, helping us solve problems, fix bugs, and release new features faster. We don’t have to wait a week or two for answers.”

ADWEEK’s improved Super Bowl performance

ADWEEK.com, underpinned by WordPress VIP platform and infrastructure, would face its biggest test on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025.

“Our Super Bowl coverage is our big tent pole moment, when our traffic is anywhere from three to six times our normal coverage,” said Ruderman. “It’s make or break in terms of visibility and owning the moment. So reliability is top of mind for us.”

When it counted, from kickoff to the Philadelphia Eagles walking off the field as 2025 Super Bowl champions, ADWEEK’s site performed flawlessly—notching 100% uptime—a marked improvement from 12 months ago. 

“Our traffic was an order of magnitude larger than last year,” said Ruderman. The YoY site stats speak volumes:

• 55% increase in visitors 
• 82% increase in pageviews 
• 24% increase in time spent on site
• 548% increase in video views 

“We had zero issues [on Super Bowl] night.”—Zoë Ruderman, Chief Content Officer, ADWEEK

Making better game-time publishing decisions with Parse.ly

ADWEEK approached the Super Bowl event as their “Super Bowl 6,” with coverage on game day, the days leading up to it, and afterward. Their game plan involved extensive prep and intel, from sourcing ad previews to readying write-ups based on expected trends. Plus putting Parse.ly in the huddle.

“Parse.ly is my first read in the morning, seriously,” noted Ryan Joe, ADWEEK’s Editor in Chief. “Our editorial team lives in it and continually looks at every single stat around our channels, such as time spent on site to traditional things like pageviews. Parse.ly helps inform our decisions about where to focus our reporting, when an article deserves a follow-up, even whether to push into a new category.”

During the Super Bowl, as the game broadcast unfolded and traffic poured into their channels, ADWEEK used Parse.ly to optimize its content strategy in real time. The Parse.ly Dashboard provided critical insights—from traffic to trending topics—influencing what ADWEEK journalists focused on, all in the name of “owning the conversation” around key moments. 

“We used Parse.ly to make real-time decisions around our [Super Bowl] editorial coverage.”—Ryan Joe, Editor in Chief, ADWEEK

Ad trendspotting

Case in point: Tubi’s buzzy “Cowboy Head” ad was all the rage, especially the morning after. Parse.ly analytics spotted it trending in conversations, helping ADWEEK capitalize on audience interest by writing a content roundup featuring it and other “rather grotesque” creatives. 

The Parse.ly heads-up paid off. When readers searched for the keywords “fleshy cowboy head,” “our article was the No. 1 result on Google,” said Joe. 

Armed with data on other head-turning ads, ADWEEK reacted quickly to produce related content and commentary in the moment. 

Maintaining 100% uptime while improving publishing efficiency

“We had zero issues on Super Bowl night,” said Corn. “From a product and platform standpoint, the fact that we didn’t have to stop for a second and say, ‘How do we fix this problem?’ was a huge win.”

“During the Super Bowl, as we were monitoring our site, VIP Support was also giving us updates every half hour. On [their] side and ours, we saw zero 500 [internal server] errors—unbelievable for a night with such high traffic. This helped us pump out more feature stories and do our jobs better. Your tech stack is extremely strong, supporting the performance we expect.”

In fact, that platform flexibility and stability freed ADWEEK editorial to publish 200%+ more Super Bowl-related content than the prior year.

Load testing FTW

ADWEEK’s Super Bowl ad tracker page is video- and resource-heavy. The publisher also hosts an advertiser-sponsored ad page, which helps them calculate ad performance using JSON file data. “That was something that gave us a big pain point last year,” Corn said. “VIP walked us through load testing, giving us optimization suggestions.”

Again, the prep work paid off. ADWEEK’s video views skyrocketed a staggering 548% compared with 2024.

The power of investing in big moments and journalism

“Our Super Bowl goal had been to “own the ad conversation,” said Ruderman, “rewarding readers with “interesting and different insights.”

“The fact we grew so aggressively year over year, with increased coverage and content, was a proof point to the success of investing in big moments and journalism that [makes it] worth people going to our site directly and through our channels.”

What’s next on ADWEEK’s VIP platform radar?

According to Corn, the publisher is looking to integrate AI- and data-based tools like the Parse.ly Content Helper into their publishing workflows to help streamline publishing and surface top-performing related content to increase recirculation. Don’t bet against them.