Chris mentioned this back in September, but since they're now accepting submissions, I figured a reminder about the Doritos Super Bowl video contest was in order. Doritos and Yahoo Video have teamed up for a special Super Bowl contest where participants can create their own Doritos commercial for Super Bowl XLI. Entries for the competition are being accepted right now, and the deadline to submit your thirty-second commercial is December 4. The top five commercial makers will win a trip to Miami for a Super Bowl viewing party and ten thousand dollars. The finalists will then be voted on and the winner will have their commercial aired during the Super Bowl. You can view some of the commercials people have already submitted on the official site, which also has images and royalty-free music to download for use in your ad. My plan is to take an Andy Warhol approach and show a still shot of a single Dorito for the entire thirty seconds.

• A group of the bottlers Coca-Cola uses as a middle man between manufacturing and retail outlets has filed suit against the soft-drink giant. The bottlers are upset about a plan by Coke to ship its Powerade energy drink to Wal-Mart retail stores itself, cutting out the middle-man role the bottlers play.
• The United States Postal Service is getting some two-dimensional help in promoting its products and services. The creators of the "Cathy" and "Dilbert" comic strips will produce a number of special strips that will be mailed on postcards to USPS customers highlighting just how great the Post Office is.
• There were a few good ones but according to Marti Barletta most of the Super Bowl ads that were supposedly geared toward women fell short on a number of fronts.

• The White House spent $1.62 billion - billion! - on paid media last year. The bulk of that was on straight advertising with the rest going to PR and other efforts. Congressional Democrats are concerned some of that is being spent on media that is being prepared and presented in a manner that doesn't identify the White House as the creator and which could be labeled propoganda. Who cares about ad budgets, I want to know how much Dick Cheney's hunting fees cost taxpayers.
• ABC offered discounts on Super Bowl ad spots of up to 40% as inventory was still available shortly before game day. Even the sticker price was around $2.3 million as opposed to the $2.6 million being touted by ABC. A good chunk of airtime was sold by ABC to, essentially itself in the form of corporate sibling Walt Disney.
• As wine makers move beyond their traditional demographics they're looking for ways to appeal to groups that might not consider wine regularly. One of their efforts to do so is by sponsoring NASCAR drivers and events.

I've held off on putting anything up about what my favorite or least favorite spots during last Sunday's Super Bowl XL were for a few days now. I know you all have been clamoring for it since my email has been pounded relentlessly for my opinion. Try to keep it down, please, I'm only human.

I'm not going to list my entire thoughts on the best or worst spots but wanted to highlight the one I thought blew the others out of the water. Interestingly it was the one that didn't bring in a single dime for ABC since it was one they themselves produced. I'm talking about the introduction to the game that had Harrison Ford and some former football personalities reading Dr. Suess' "Oh, the Places You'll Go." The Suessian drawings in the background and the way some of the text was meshed in to lead into the game a bit better were eye-catching and attention grabbing, so much so that I wound up rewinding the bit about three times to watch it over and over again. Add in the fact that Ford not only gave his best performance since 1994's Clear and Present Danger and that he was sporting a beard that made me think he was going to go hunting for a one-armed man and you had an intriguing and effective bit of promotion. It's this kind of clever but not ridiculous thinking that was missing from so many of the spots that were bought and paid for by outside companies and agencies. Gets my vote for the play of the game and it's about the only thing that's not on any of the sites where you can watch the rest of the game's commercials. It's not even on ABC's site. Bummer.

According to this story from the Boston Herald, a group of advertising professionals in Boston who get together and hold an event called "Ad Bash" during the Super Bowl thought the best commercial during the game was the one for Emerald Nuts. The spot, titled "Machete Man", won their Best Overall award while the Whopperettes spot from Burger King got the opposite award, labeled the Toilet Bowl Award.

I have to echo what Lost Remote said about this. Not only does their award run counter to most all polls after the game which put Emerald Nuts' spot somewhere near the bottom but, in addition to that, it doesn't matter. Ad people are looking at the ads like any other trade group reviews its own work. They think in terms of what creative points were achieved and not, and this is important, how the spot will increase sales of the product being advertised.

I think it's great for ad creators that the Super Bowl ads are getting a second life on the internet. It means they get to say that the product they created was viewed not only by X number of people during the game (a fuzzy number that is generated via sampling) but also by a much more easily quantified number of people on the web. But that group is the only winner from this year's game and ad showcase.

There's a definite irony to the web being the place where so many people are viewing the ads. Very few of the ads contained any call to action that pushed people to the web for anything other than entertainment. It was like it was 1998 all over again with the paucity of commercials that even contained so much as a URL at the end of the spot. Those that did primarily pointed viewers to a microsite such as Burger King's Whopperettes effort were more about entertainment than driving purchasing. Now I'm far from an expert but isn't the point of advertising to help sell products? While an entertaining and amusing ad can definitely have value there needs to be something that encourages the consumer to spend money on the product getting plugged, right? So why not offer someone a coupon for a Whopper after they build their sandwich online? Why not offer a random visitors a ringtone or some such when you visit the site in the first 48 hours after the Super Bowl ends. Why not, in short, give the customer a reason to buy?

So you have the web basically being utilized as a glorified DVR for watching 15, 30 or 60 second commercials but that's all the consumer is being asked to do while they're there. What's the point? Isn't the internet supposed to contain - especially in this day and age - some element of interactivity? And I'm not just talking about making a bunch of women dressed as condiments jump on each other (I'd like to know how they got that from my head to their drawing board) but don't give them the opportunity to buy anything. Major missed opportunity.

I'd like to see how the network that airs next year's Super Bowl sets ad prices. My guess is that they're going to start factoring these online viewing numbers into the audience figures they use to set the rate card. Right now they're just counting the TV audience but I can see them start saying things like, "Having an ad on the Super Bowl will also get you this many online views so here's how we're factoring that into the pricing."

One of the things I felt was notable about last night's Super Bowl ads was that the ads were available in such a wide variety of places. Not only did many of the companies have the ads on their own websites (some of which were available for downloading to your computer and portable device) but there were a few sites - and I'm likely leaving a bunch out - that rounded all or most of them up.

• First up is Google Video. They created a special site just for the Super Bowl ads, about 40 or so. It even includes a handy link that lets you watch them all in one fell swoop and lets you know doing so will only take about 20 minutes.
• Mothership AOL has a gallery of the spots broken down by quarter. And the site even loads with a commercial, a brief teaser for the upcoming new season of The Sopranos.
• The NFL won't let you forget these commercials are associated with football and so have put the spots on their homepage.
• iFilm not only has most of the spots (this time broken down by parent company) available to watch but they've made the ads very friendly for web publishers to grab. They put a cool "Snag" link next to each spot that copies the code for an image and the link back to iFilm to the Windows clipboard for you to then paste into your blog or site. Tom and I utilized this feature a couple times last night and it's a great example of reaching out to citizen journalists. Nice move by iFilm.

I don't know about Tom but I'm exhausted after last night's live blogging of the Super Bowl and I didn't do half the work he did. There seems to be an extraordinary amount of coverage, most of which is comprised of the best and worst according to the individual publications. Here's some of the recaps and results from around the web

• Anheuser-Busch's "Secret Fridge" spot for Bud Light won top honors in this year's USA Today Ad Meter survey.
• Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune wonders whether the writers of those disclaimers think we're all idiots. The Trib thought the FedEx caveman was the best of the year.
• In his Across the Sound podcast, Joseph Jaffe asks something that I was wondering about last night too - Where were the calls to go to the websites of the companies advertising? Almost nobody had a URL in their ad save a few. Major missed opprotunity.
• TiVo says the most rewound (?) ad from the game was the Ameriquest "Friendly Skies" spot.
• Barbara Lippert ad AdWeek thinks the problem with the commercials this year was a universal lack of payoff, or no actual punchline.
• Google reminded advertisers that they need to pay attention to their online efforts as well as spots on the big game.
• Wondering what the behavior of a 17-year old controlling the remote during the Super Bowl is like? Stephen Baker details how that went down in his house.
• Seth Stevenson at Slate lists his best and worst.

I'm going to weigh in later on my list and other thoughts.

• Wow, could Bob Garfield be anymore upset by the Rolling Stones performing during halftime of the Super Bowl yesterd? He tears into the aged rockers once again before commenting on most of the other ads from yesterday's broadcast. Question for you, Bob: When has rock and roll NOT been about making money?
• Great article here on the potential pitfalls of brand extension. Too often companies think that consumers will actually buy the things they tell a survey taker would be interesting or unique. That leads to a lot of failed brands.
• Must be gripe day at the AdAge offices because The Media Guy takes a series of swipes at Columbia University for asking Bonnie Fuller, editor of Star and Celebrity Living to come talk about journalism.