In Super Bowl Ratings Bonanza, Ads Are Minuses

If you were among the 93.15 million people CBS says watched Sunday's orgy of soggy football, ads with budgets equal to a Third World country's GNP, and his royal highness Prince, you are part of the second-largest TV audience in Super Bowl history.

You also are part of the third-biggest television audience ever -- behind only the 105 million who tuned in for the very last episode of "M*A*S*H" more than two decades ago, and the 94 million who caught Super Bowl XXX in '96.

Sadly, only about 26 million of you stuck around to watch "Criminal Minds" -- the lucky CBS series to get the plum postgame time slot. CBS points out that that's the biggest audience ever for the drama about a panel of experts who race to profile pervy criminals before they strike again.

But it's well below the nearly 38 million who'd stuck around after last year's game (which clocked about 90.7 million viewers) to watch "Grey's Anatomy." From which we learn that people who like football presented in five-minute chunks between blocks of very expensive commercials designed to appeal to 18-year-old beer-swilling men also like watching a series about a hospital chockablock with hot, horny doctors. But they are not necessarily people who like to watch a show about a serial killer who videotapes the murders he commits and posts them on the Internet where they become a YouTube-ish hit because we live in a dark and miserable world.

That post-Super Bowl broadcast of "Grey's" catapulted it from a successful sophomore series to the ABC mega-hit it is today. CBS hopes to see similar ratings results for "Criminal Minds," which has been the fastest-growing sophomore series so far this season.

Unlike most Super Bowls, this year the game, in which the Colts trampled the Bears, 29-17, in a driving rain in Miami, may have been more fun to watch than the ads.

Because who doesn't like watching beefy men slipping and sliding on a drenched football field while fumbling a slippery pigskin ball. Really, the NFL should start greasing footballs on dry days.

Meanwhile, instead of pushing the envelope, the 20 or so advertisers who ponied up northward of $2.6 million per 30 secs of Super Bowl airtime played it safe.

The only ad that made you sit up and take notice was the gone-in-a-blink spot in which CBS late-night star David Letterman, wearing a Colts jersey, cozies up on the couch with Oprah Winfrey, wearing a Bears jersey, to watch the game. That ad was striking because Letterman is notorious in his unwillingness to work with his network's marketing and promo people.

As for the rest of the Super Bowl spots, many tended toward sophomoric violence or the saccharine. Gone are the good old days of combusting horse farts, guy bikini waxes and old referees suffering shrewish wives. Even the busty GoDaddy.com skank -- you know, the one with the broken cami strap who titillated faux congressmen at a pretend TV decency hearing the year after Janet Jackson's right breast made its Super Bowl halftime debut -- was this year reduced to a tame dancer-in-the-office joke.

This year, Careerbuilders.com dumped its chimpanzees in favor of a "work is a jungle" theme (been there, seen that) in which office employees are in a jungle being tortured by management.

Budweiser went with two guys playing the rock/paper/scissors game to decide who gets the last beer -- a game won by the guy who decks the other with a rock.

In a Doritos ad sprung from an online contest (Dorito's CEO memo to his marketing vice president: Tell me again why we pay our creative team six figures apiece?), a chip-eating guy crashes his car watching a cute chip-eating chick, who then rushes to his rescue, slips and hits her head on his vehicle.

The manager of the moon's first office arranges for FedEx pickups there, which gets him a slap on the back from his boss, which launches him into space, where he is blown to oblivion by a comet.

And some company or other regaled us with an ad in which Old Heart Guy gets the stuffing beat out of him by a gang of thugs named High Blood Pressure, Cholesterol and Diabetes.

Rating high on the cute-o-meter:

· A stray white dog gets to ride with the Budweiser Clydesdales when he's mistaken for a Dalmatian after being splattered by mud.

· Adorable little red crabs worship a red Budweiser ice chest.

· A Spielbergian-sweet General Motors auto-assembly-line robot gets the sack after accidentally dropping a part, can't hold down another job and becomes so depressed he eventually throws himself off a bridge -- by way of illustrating how GM is crazy for quality.

· Emerald Nuts explains that when your blood sugar gets low in the afternoon, Robert Goulet comes to your office and messes things up.