• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, February 2, 2015

The Super Bowl commercials once seemed to have a longer lasting buzz. Now, they just seem like something you have to watch. They’re like turkey on Thanksgiving. You eat it because it's put in front of you. 

It seems advertising creatives might be thinking just about the same way. Many Super Bowl commercials are just a reworking of warmed over memes.

A piece of research today discloses that a majority of the advertisers didn’t even reference their $4.5 million-per-thirty-second jewel on their own Web sites.

A study by Wywy, the cross-screen advertising ad tracking company, found that of 56 Super Bowl advertisers, less than half (45% to be exact) showed a “clearly visible reference” to their advertised product on their Web sites. Only 38% prominently displayed or referenced the product the mobile version of their homepages.

Wywy says 48% inserted a hashtag into their commercial, which, really, sounds pretty lame. If the big purpose of advertising in the game is to start a conversation about your product, how could more than half the advertisers not give prompts to viewers to send them on the correct path? Supposedly, something like one in three viewers look up info about advertisers after seeing an ad, or try to. 

I’d say that part of the answer is that as the Super Bowl leaves its awkward XLVIIIIs and enters full-fledged middle L age, advertisers have forgotten why they are producing the ads, or buying the time. It’s about as muddy as why we still care to watch them.

MediaPost’s Larissa Faw reported Friday that half of us watch the Super Bowl just for the commercials, but 31% of us watch the ads because watching is a tradition, according to Horizon Media. And now, so are the daylong controversies the advertising creates. It all seems kind of halfhearted.

Those gaining attention might be getting the kind they could do without.

The Twitterverse “exploded” -- that always seems to be the verb when there’s a surge of comment -- over the downer Nationwide Insurance ad in which a little kid reminisced about all the great times he might have had -- had he not died in a household accident. This, I think we can agree, was just about the most depressing ad ever. Adweek put together a good collection of cutting Twitter responses. A friend retweeted one that represents many:

"You just won the Super Bowl where are you going next?"

"I'm going to Disneyland!"

*son dies of measles*

Nationwide is on your side

It turns out CNN was at meetings in November when Nationwide finalized the ad, and that it intended for it to start a controversy.

Ogilvy & Mather Advertising created it, and the agency’s president, Adam Tucker, told CNN,  ‘In 60 seconds, we can probably bring more attention and awareness and action around this issue than we have in 60 years.”

Well, true. Though I think most of the awareness reflected badly on Nationwide’s judgment. So, while now America may know how a big a problem preventable household accidents can be, it has also made a joke out of the insurance company that just told them the news. This ad became a parody of the feel-good Super Bowl spot, not a jarring juxtaposition of one. (It's gotten 1.7 million views on YouTube. Of 8,000 or so responses, 6,000 are thumbs-down.)

Unfortunately, on YouTube its own funky halftime AdBlitz show seemed to be a parody of itself, itchy in its self-consciousness, starting right with the title song, “This Is The First Ever YouTube Halftime Show” with lots of references to the cheap (as in, well cheap) thrills to come. Those which included a tank-dunking segment, a toothpaste explosion and the “Epic Patty Cake Show,” in which performers and the audience participated in an a capella, lap-slap, hand-slap rendition of “I Will Think Of You.”

It wasn’t Katy Perry. It was, as Ad Age noted (charitably), “unpretentious” and “awkwardly charming,” but I’d be lying if it didn’t make me start to wonder how long YouTube can go before it gets a rave for something that is called “professionally produced”?