TELEVISION | SUPER BOWL COMMERCIALS

Spate of stupid TV ads replacing era of super ads

BY GLENN GARVIN

Call it brilliant self-mockery, call it cheesy exploitation, call it the ultimate McLuhanesque moment. Whatever you call it, the GoDaddy.com ad during Sunday's Super Bowl should mark the beginning of the end of the national obsession with the telecast's commercials.

GoDaddy, an Internet-service company that's made a point of getting its Super Bowl ads banned the past few years, outdid itself this year. After deliberately submitting an ad it knew Fox would never be willing to air, GoDaddy turned around and made a commercial about the banned commercial. In it, a young woman at a viewing party sniffs that ''I used to watch the Super Bowl for the commercials'' but now all the good ones have been kicked off TV to the Internet. All the partyers rush to a computer, where slinky auto racer Danica Patrick can be seen zipping up her blouse.

The ad's real punch line, though, was you -- if you ran to the computer to check out GoDaddy's forbidden fruit. The banned commercial got the boot from Fox not for showing too much skin -- you can see more in most ''after'' shots in Jenny Craig ads -- but for double-entendre use of a word that normally describes a flat-tailed animal that gnaws trees and builds dams.

Super Bowl ads have long since declined from the memorable imagery of Apple's 1984 ad to the flaming horse flatulence featured in a Bud Light commercial a couple of years ago. But this year was the first in which advertisers abandoned all pretense of wit or creativity and simply tried to turn the fixation on ads in on itself. The ultimate example was KFC, which didn't even buy an ad, but got a ton of free publicity by offering $270,000 to the ''favorite charity'' of any New England or New York player willing to do its ''chicken dance'' on the field during the game.

Most of the companies that did buy ads tried to leverage the $90,000-a-second cost into a tsunami of free publicity on the Internet and TV newscasts. What was easily the most entertaining ad -- Justin Timberlake, being magnetically drawn to a young woman sucking on a Pepsi straw, Freudian overtones definitely intended -- was also the stalest, having been seen a zillion times on cable news and video-sharing websites before it ever aired. Unilever's ad for its Sunsilk shampoo -- depicting Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Christina Aguilera and of course you, if you use Sunsilk, as icons -- calls into question what a ''Super Bowl commercial'' even is. The ad was released to news media and the Internet two weeks ago.

At least the Pepsi and Sunsilk ads were engaging. Some advertisers took the opposite route, trying to achieve notoriety through determined mediocrity. Salesgenie.com, whose ad -- so shoddily produced it looked like it was dubbed into English from another language -- in the 2007 Super Bowl was widely acclaimed in industry journals as the game's worst commercial, produced two more mindless ads, this time substituting amateurish animation and sing-song stereotypical Asian accents for lifeless video. Unfortunately, calculated stupidity seems to work as well as sleazy cheesecake in drawing customers to the Internet; last year's ad resulted in 25,000 new registrations at Salesgenie.com in 24 hours as people flocked to the website to see if it was really as dumb as it seemed.

The stupid-is-the-new-smart ethos of post-modern Super Bowl advertising apparently accounts for some of the otherwise inexplicable ads Sunday.

Would I really want to try Gatorade because I saw a dog drinking it? Would I eat Doritos because I saw a guy in a giant rat suit beat the crap out of a guy to the soundtrack of Carmen? (OK, I admit I watched that one twice on my TiVo, but I'm still not going to buy any Doritos.)

Likewise, though I truly enjoyed an ad for the Toyota Corolla, I'm sure it wasn't for any reason the car company imagined.

In a parody of one of those consumer-test commercials, the ad demonstrated what a quiet ride the car is by locking a young man inside the vehicle with a pack of sleeping badgers.

''If awakened, they'll gnaw his face off,'' the announcer unctuously intones as cannons begin firing all around the car. (The cannon fire didn't sound inside the car, but then the young man's cellphone rang . . .) As I watched, I dreamed not of a new Toyota, but that the badgers would escape and break into the next commercial -- a Fox promo for American Idol -- and gnaw Simon Cowell's face off. Go ahead, Simon, tell 'em they're pitchy.