At work I got an email saying that my Outlook inbox was over the allotted bandwidth. I was shocked, (not “how-can-this-be” shock, because I save everything so I did not doubt I did indeed reach the allocation level) because we had an allocation level that I was able to reach. I look to my Gmail and Yahoo accounts and for years their maximum allocation has grown well faster than I could catch, even with saving just about every email.

Yahoo recently announced that they are doing away with the allocation altogether, this is relatively trivial; considering they were already outside the scope of most people’s usage, but at the same time it was absolutely a huge move. Since the costs of storage continue to drop, Yahoo determined it was too cheap to meter and more strategic to just give it away for free, and find the revenue in another way (advertising or cross-selling perhaps).

This move to the FREE business model is the basis of this very illuminating WIRED magazine article from Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail). This article dives into the business strategies of the digital age, and the new economics that are essentially being invented on the fly that make sense of this bold new world. It’s a very intriguing look at the where we are economically and how the Internet and digital media is driving where we are heading, to a world where we get a whole lot more, for FREE.

The Super Bowl advertisers pay for the opportunity to speak to an exceptionally massive and captive audience. Let’s take a look at how excelled and who completely missed the mark.

Best in Show:
The Coke ad with the parade balloons
This was just a feel-good commercial from being at the parade to seeing the essence of toddlers wanting the Coke to good old Charlie Brown finally winning something. Just great.

Best Montage:
Hank the Clydesdale
It was a Rocky montage, that’s the hands-down winner every year, no matter what the commercial is.

Best Single Line: (tie)
“Knock it off” when everyone was doing the Night at the Roxbury head bob and “I under-estimated their creepiness” by the baby talking about the clown he hired. In both cases the commercial were edging close to being unremarkable, but the line at the end ascended them into deserving mention at the water cooler this morning.

Best Cross-Media promotion:
GoDaddy “exposing” Danica Patrick
It was actually cheap and gimmicky (and misleading) but it was the only company that really transfer the massive Super Bowl audience to their website, so they get the nod.

Best Actually Selling of their Product:
DELL Red
They played on some pretty base desires, acceptance and attractiveness, by essentially saying this DELL will make you popular and hot girls will want to make out with you.

Worst Single Concept:
The “I Quit” heart
When that heart leapt of out of that woman’s body and held up a sign that says “I Quit”, we thought it was announcing the woman had died.

Worst Direction:
The down-on-his-luck drug dealer.
The director missed the mark and gave the guy some pathos, I had to remind myself not to feel sorry for him, he’s deals drugs to kids.

Worst Interference:
LifeWater with Naomi Campbell doing the Thriller dance.
This reeks of meddling by upper brass not in marketing. The scenario that played through my head was that the executives decided they have too much money invested not to micro-manage the creative process. So, it starts with the insistence that they use the commercial to brand their “I’m-not-theGIECO-gecko” mascot. Then someone with “C” at the beginning of their three letter title decides a Super Bowl ad needs a celebrity, never mind what for, and gets Naomi Campbell hired on. Then a different “C-blank-O” watched a viral YouTube of a Thriller dance breaking out at a wedding and decided that was both cool and funny, and aren’t those the qualities they are looking for in a Super Bowl ad? End result – too many unrelated ideas, all just slapped together.

Worst of the Worst
SalesGenie with the animated Panda
This ad was horrifically offensive. It was a parade of up every negative stereotype of Chinese people. I have to imagine someone is going to get fired for these.