Got a cool $4 Million sitting around? That’s what a 30-second  Super Bowl commercial costs this year, and advertisers are banking on huge ROI — major website traffic increases and big social engagement.

But are they ready?

Spikes in traffic (perhaps the biggest companies will see all year) require massive transactional processing power. Without it, advertisers inch closer to disaster with every user click — and while there’s never a good time for an outage, when there’s a $4m investment on the line, the pressure is on.

Here are a few strategies to help advertisers and social channels to avoid major fumbles:

1. Get on the same page. Marketing teams build entire campaigns around Super Bowl advertisements, and IT departments and DBAs need to be in the know from day one. A website outage or slowed servers can kill months of work and throw millions down the drain.
2. Expect more. More users. More content. At the end last year’s Super Bowl, there were 12,233 tweets sent per second — the highest number of tweets per second for an English-language event in Twitter’s history. With even more Twitter users this year, you can expect to see an even higher number.
3. Know the consequences & if you’re in the line of fire. Take YouTube for example — there’s a whole group of people that skip the game all together, but watch the commercials on YouTube. Between uploading videos of the commercials, watching the videos, sharing, liking and commenting, YouTube needs to be  prepared for an onslaught of activity, regardless of ties to the actual event. Otherwise, they face lots of angry users and loss of confidence, bringing credibility into question.

Just like the Ravens and the 49ers, advertisers and social media networks have one shot to prove themselves this Sunday. With the proper infrastructure in place, these organizations can score big — but an unexpected outage send them to the locker room early.