I’ve had this story ready to go for years. The ads keep getting worse. This year, I’m finally pulling the trigger because rock bottom has been hit.

So why are the ads crap? I think it’s because each year advertisers want to top what has been done before. They want to do something bigger and more outrageous. But in the end that equates to dumber, cruder and well, dumber. I said it again.

Thirty seconds of airtime cost about $30 million dollars. That’s a lot of cake. Nobody wants to spend that kind of money and not get noticed. So advertisers push the limits of believability, they abandon concept and they focus on trying to get viewer jaws to drop with special effects. Here’s one spot from a great agency that was especially bad.

In contrast, Coca-Cola ran this Super Bowl commercial a few years ago and in my opinion, it’s the last great commercial I’ve seen that warranted 100 million viewers.

This year, there was only one clear winner and that was the commercial that didn’t run in the Super Bowl. The gay dating service Mancrunch.com generated millions in free publicity when CBS rejected the ad.

There was one bright spot in yesterday’s game and that was for Google. They used TV to promote a search engine. They used a love story to promote technology. It was a beautiful juxtaposition. My only nit is that this concept didn’t need to run in the Super Bowl – in fact its understated quality was probably missed by many shitfaced football fans. And that’s too bad. They missed a helluva commercial.