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."