Commercials: From Foul To Fabulous

The Super Bowl is one of the few - if not the only - shows on television whose audience actually looks forward to the commercials. In fact, the Super Bowl ads are the only reason some people tune in at all.

Can you say the same thing about Lost or 24?

With sky-high viewership ratings - last year's game drew a single-day, sporting-event record 97.4 million viewers - it is little wonder Super Bowl commercials are the most expensive in the TV universe. This year's cost: about $3 million for a 30-second spot.

Yes, these tough economic times have forced some companies not to advertise during the big game in Tampa, but NBC officials say they sold most of its Super Bowl ad inventory by September -- before the meltdown on Wall Street.

So, let's take a closer look at the hoopla of Super Bowl commercials - the winners, losers and some facts you might not have known about these expensive slices of your time. By the way, most of these can be relived on YouTube.com.

5 FOUL SUPER BOWL COMMERCIALS

Just For Feet's drugged Kenyan ad (1999): The more time goes by, the more you have to wonder how this commercial ever made it past the concept stage, let alone on TV. White men in a Humvee track down a barefooted Kenyan runner, give him a cup of water that contains a drug to knock him out, then, while he's unconscious, they put a pair of running shoes on his feet. When he wakes, the Kenyan screams "No!" And runs off trying to shake off the shoes. Brilliant. No wonder Just For Feet filed for bankruptcy later the same year.

Holiday Inn's sex change ad (1997): At a high school reunion, a man learns that a former male classmate has spent $17,000 for a sex change. Then Holiday Inn asks you to imagine all the great changes it can make spending a billion dollars for its renovations. Uh, should we have looked more carefully under our beds during our stays at the hotel that year?

Burger King's "Find Herb the Nerd" ad (1986): Burger King asked patrons to find Herb the Nerd, a guy who had never tasted one of its burgers in his life. Despite the commercial being universally panned after the Super Bowl, the fast food giant went on to spend tens of millions on this campaign. BK even sent an actor around the country to appear as Herb and offered its patrons prizes for spotting him, but Herb still flopped in a major way.

Apple's Suicidal Lemmings (1985): This might be the darkest Super Bowl ad ever. Just a year after producing one of the best Super Bowl commercials, Apple decided to introduce its Macintosh Office with an ad featuring blindfolded workers marching up a hill whistling "Heigh-ho" and then jumping off a cliff like lemmings once they reached the top. Boy, that's an uplifting ad, huh? Anyone for watching Schindler's List after the game?

Bud Bowl VI (1994): What was once a barely-palatable commercial between bottles of beer wearing football helmets begins its timely demise, although it took two more Bud Bowls to totally kill off the series. This one includes stiff efforts from people already unbearably stiff -- Marv Albert, Bum Phillips and Mike Ditka. And the star of the game is a foul-mouthed, break-dancing beer can. Oh, the lameness.

5 FABULOUS SUPER BOWL COMMERCIALS

Monster.com's "When I grow up" ad (1999): Arguably one of the best commercials of all time. One by one, bright-eyed children tell us when they grow up, they want to do things like "be a receptionist," "point the finger somewhere else when something goes wrong," "have people wonder what I do all day long," "be a kiss-up" and "so far removed from the day-to-day business I need a crane to pull my bloated head out of my a--." Simply wonderful.

FedEx's Caveman ad (2006): A caveman named Grog gets fired by his caveman boss for not using FedEx to get a stick delivered. Speaking in caveman with English subtitles, Grog implores, "But FedEx doesn't exist yet!" His boss coldly replies, "Not my problem." Poor Grog walks out of the boss' cave and kicks a small passing dinosaur. And then Grog's lousy day is ended when he is squashed by a Brachiosaurus.

Apple's George Orwell ad (1984): Apple introduces its revolutionary Macintosh computer with a rather dark ad that, in terms of its impact, has never been equaled. The ad, directed by Ridley Scott (Aliens, Blade Runner) is homage to George Orwell's novel 1984 about a repressive, totalitarian society. The ad had a then-unheard of production budget of $900,000 and has been one of the most studied commercials in U.S. marketing history.

Reebok's Terry Tate Office Linebacker (2003): When it aired, this ad was the most-watched part of the Super Bowl by TiVo viewers. And despite airing just once nationally, the ad was downloaded more than seven million times from Reebok's website. It features Lester Speight as "Terrible" Terry Tate, a linebacker who deals out bone-crushing tackles to those who don't follow office rules. If someone jams the copy machine without fixing it, makes long-distance calls on company time or steals someone's cake in the office fridge, Tate's "Pain Train" is coming. "Woo-woo!"

E*Trade's monkey ad (2000): This was an instant classic. Two dorks sitting in a garage clap along as a monkey in an E*Trade t-shirt dances to La Cucaracha. The punch line: "Well, we just wasted 2 million bucks. What are you doing with your money?" That was the average cost for a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl then. This ad was stupidly brilliant, but the company's shares dropped the next two years and only recently bounced back to profitability.

DID YOU KNOW ...

DreamWorks, Pepsi, Intel Corp. and NBC have teamed up to create the Super Bowl's first ever 3-D ad. The spot will promote DreamWorks' upcoming film, Monsters vs. Aliens, but will co-promote Pepsi's SoBe beverage with an appearance by the SoBe lizards of last year's Super Bowl fame. NBC will cross-promote by telling viewers to hang on to their 3-D glasses to watch a 3-D episode of Chuck immediately following the game. The glasses are being distributed by Pepsi via 25,000 SoBe Life Water displays in grocery stores and other retail venues.

GoDaddy let viewers decide which of its two NBC-approved ads will appear during the Super Bowl. The choices were an ad featuring race car driver Danica Patrick taking a shower with another woman as three college students watch, or an ad spoofing Major League Baseball's steroids scandal, which also features Patrick. Voting ended Jan. 23.

The average cost for a 30-second commercial in 1967 was $42,000. But this year's Super Bowl ad price tag is nearly $3 million, and that doesn't include whatever the company spends in the production of the commercial. The cost of the ad can also vary from quarter to quarter, with ads in the first half of the game costing more than pregame and fourth-quarter ads.

Pepsi has managed to lock up all the advertising for non-alcoholic beverages in the first half of this year's Super Bowl. Coke has to wait until the second half to show an ad.

For the first time in 12 years, FedEx will not run a Super Bowl ad. The delivery company's Web site cited "unprecedented economic waters" as its reason for not buying a spot this year.

Anheuser-Busch InBev, the maker of Budweiser and Bud Light, is expected to have five minutes' worth of advertising in this year's Super Bowl. At about $3 million per 30-second spot, that's going to cost the beer giant $30 million.