I've had the godaddy.com jingle stuck in my head since the first quarter of the Super Bowl on Sunday and, having just watched the godaddy.com Super Bowl commercial again, I'm sure it will be stuck there longer.  I'll leave it up to you to decide if that is good or bad advertising. Personally, I've found it very annoying.

Whether you find the Super Bowl commercials the only reason to watch the "Big Game", or find them to be an annoying distraction from a great sporting contest, you can't argue that they've morphed into something huge.  Polls, surveys and research have been conducted just around these annual ads.  The cost for these TV spots is rumored to be $2.7 million for thirty seconds.  They've taken on a life of their own and now, online, they have an afterlife as well.  You can view most of the commercials on aol.com, and the rest you can see on the ubiquitous youtube.com.  Some were popular, some were winners and others were creepy or just missed their mark.

Depending on what survey you check, a couple of different commercials ranked #1: according to tivo.com, E-Trade's talking baby who buys stock and then spits up on himself was number one; according to aol.com, the winner was the Budweiser Rocky parody.  Either way, both commercials were seen by an enormous number of people, the most ever for a Super Bowl, averaging 97.5 million viewers with a peak of 148.3 million viewers according to si.com.  Budweiser clearly thought the cost-benefit was worth it, they had the most commercials with seven. 

Humor and celebrity took the day with appearances by Will Farrell, Justin Timberlake, Dwayne Wade, Charles Barkley, Carlos Mencia, Derek Jeter and Carmen Electra, just to name a few.

One of the funnier commercials, to me, was the Doritos Mouse Trap.  Though there was no celebrity, a sight gag was used to funny effect.  A young, well dressed man walks into an apartment.  He sets a mouse trap with a piece of a Doritos Nacho Cheese chip in front of a tiny mouse hole in a wall and sits down to watch the drama unfold.  Unexpectedly, a person in a mouse suit breaks through the wall, tackles and punches the man. 

The one that missed by the biggest margin was the Ice Breakers Carmen Electra spot.  In this commercial, Carmen is making a celebrity appearance and posing for photos with several annoying and over the top male fans, while her surly security guards look on.  Finally, a normal looking guy offers her an Ice Breaker.  The gum makes her say "Wow," which is the safety word, and her guards take him down with a tackle.  It was a tired gag that didn't make me laugh.

My personal favorite featured the almost always hilarious Will Farrell and advertised two products.  It was Will Farrell as Jackie Moon, a 1970's basketball player/coach who proclaims in the spot that Bud Light is "a magical blend of barley, hops and delicious alcohol."  So Bud Light and Farrell's new movie, Semi-Pro, both get some exposure.  Much of the success of this commercial is directly linked to Farrell's dry delivery, reminiscent of his role in Anchorman. 

I mentioned the E-Trade baby above.  He was creepy.  It was a cute baby using a webcam and talking, in an adult voice, about making stock trades online, as easy as "click."  It concluded with the baby spitting up on himself.  There was a sequel where the same baby spends his extra "coin" on a clown, which, the baby says, is creepy.  I agree.  A talking or a dancing baby (if you remember the Ally McBeal baby) is often creepy and so, sometimes, are clowns.  The popularity of this spot found by Tivo either proves that: a) creepy can be a good thing, or b) it wasn't actually creepy, just funny.

For those of you who found the commercials a welcome diversion or a lively discussion subject during the Big Game, I hope you saw the one-handed miraculous catch by the Giant’s David Tyree and then argued whether that was the best part of the game, or whether it was the Budweiser Rocky commercial. Sometimes it is easy to forget that it is this sports spectacle that provides the forum for these commercials. Though, perhaps the real winner was Fox. The game turned out to be exciting in the end, proving, finally, after several lackluster Super Bowls, that there is another reason to watch, other than the commercials that is.

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