For those gamblers who prefer the stock market to Las Vegas, a good Super Bowl tip would have been to short all the publicly traded dot-coms who advertised on it. None of the dot-coms that advertised in the big bowl are trading at or above their game-day price, and many are down by as much as 60 percent. Ego-gratifying Super Bowl ads are one thing if you're a privately held company and your investors -- for whatever reason -- will let you get away with it, but the shareholders of these publicly traded stocks seem to have cause to wonder what exactly these companies thought they were doing with investors' nest eggs.

At the close of trading Tuesday, Hotjobs stock was down 60 percent from its Jan. 31 trading price (the first trading day after the Super Bowl) -- from almost $28 to just above $11. Netpliance was down 65 percent from the $22 it commanded three months ago, to less than $8; and its Internet appliance product, the I-Opener, is selling at a remarkable discount -- "Now only $99 (regular price $199)" chirps the Web site. And Healtheon/WebMD was feeling the pain, down 69 percent from $65 to $20. Not even a $220 million shot in the company's arm at the beginning of April from the company's founder, Silicon Valley pioneer Jim Clark, and famed venture capitalist John Doerr could give the stock more than a few days' bounce.

But the saddest whimpering stock of the bunch is Pets.com, which was down 73 percent from $11 on Jan. 31 to $3 after the dot-crash. The wags on the company's Yahoo message board last week drubbed the company in messages with subject lines like "THIS DEAD PET."

Though Pets.com's big ad spending has done little to pump up the company's stock, it has made that irrepressible sock puppet something of a household image. So Pets.com is now pursuing a new strategy to recoup some of the $20 million it has reportedly spent on ads starring the floppy-eared mascot, a puppet which may prove to be its most valuable asset. Last week, Pets.com announced its intention to sell merchandise featuring the sock puppet in brick-and-mortar stores. Perhaps selling its mascot's image offline will be more immediately profitable than its core business of hawking Meow Mix over the Net. Maybe all that "brand building" will pay off yet! As if to defend this important revenue stream for the company, Pets.com is suing a former writer for "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," for defamation and trade libel of its "spokespuppet."

The recent trading history of the public dot-coms that joined the Super Bowl binge might give pause to a company like WebEx, the online meeting company that brought a hyper-glam RuPaul before millions of beer-swilling Super Bowl viewers, spending $1.2 million to secure a 30-second spot just in major markets. In December, the company announced it had closed a $25 million round of financing and had "committed a majority of the new funds to marketing efforts." In April WebEx filed to go public, so it shouldn't be too long before we see just how much market buzz $25 million and a celebrity drag queen can buy you.

We know stock prices can be fickle, especially lately. "That's just the market talking, not our customers," the dot-coms exclaim. But the only other quantifiable index of a site's branding success is traffic. And, excepting a temporary bounce in the days following the game, all that money spent on the Super Bowl has shown few signs of broadening these companies' audience.

Take the case of OurBeginning.com, an online stationery store in Orlando, Fla., with essentially no name recognition before the game. According to Media Metrix (whose numbers remain the industry standard, despite their apparent flaws), the site had 362,000 unique visitors in January; 547,000 in February; and "no reportable traffic" in March, meaning that by Media Metrix's count, fewer than 250,000 individuals visited the site.

Still, Michael Budowski, CEO of OurBeginning.com, defends his decision to run the ad, which featured cheesy brides viciously cat-fighting over stationery: "The Super Bowl bought our company credibility," he says, deadly serious. He says the ad gets the company in the door with some big corporate clients -- "Oh, yes. You guys did the Super Bowl." -- and has helped reel in at least one $3 million customer. He thinks they'll do another ad next year.

For sites like E-Trade, Monster.com or Pets.com, which have done extensive ad campaigns, the effect of the Super Bowl traffic is harder to measure. But Monster.com's attempt to use Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" poem to induce job-seekers to check out their classified-ad job site hasn't been evidently persuasive. While PC Data Online, which tracks Web usage statistics, reported that the site got an immediate 80 percent increase in traffic from the ad on the day of the game, there was no apparent longer term benefit -- Media Metrix clocked the site's traffic at 3.6 million unique visitors in January, 3.5 million in February and 3.4 million in March.

So, if a Super Bowl ad didn't intrigue investors enough to drive up your stock price and didn't excite consumers enough to drive sustainable traffic to your site, what exactly was the point of the big outlay? Just a wacky once-a-year stunt?

Certainly, blasting more than 100 million consumers with your brand name is a weird way to win corporate clients. Stewart of USC dryly says: "The typical business manager doesn't watch the Super Bowl for purposes of finding his next vendor." So what were companies like WebEx and Healtheon/WebMD, doing there in the first place? Perhaps trying to get their name out in front of investors (read: day traders) and well, yes, customers.

David Thompson, vice president of marketing for WebEx, says the venue made sense for the company's "hyper-branding" initiative since WebEx is a "B2E" play. (Um, "business-to-employee," I'm told.) "The Web turns old advertising rules on its head," he enthuses. (Wait, isn't this TV advertising?) "The best way to reach that man or woman may be through a Super Bowl ad. They're human beings first and customers second. Hit them where they live!"

Ford of Computer.com calculates media coverage his company got for doing the ad was worth $10 million, not the $3.5 million paid. Surely, the value of Diane Sawyer on ABC's "Good Morning America" cooing "I liked the Computer.com ads" cannot be quantified in mere digits. And Ford reminds me that I, too, am contributing to the return on his investment in the Super Bowl by writing about it: "I don't know if you're aware, but you're doing a story, so you're a part of it!" he says triumphantly.

As far as the highest goal of such advertising, the ever-elusive building of brand, it's not clear that those ads really "hit" anyone. The people who care about this stuff for a living, like the ad execs at D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMBB) in St. Louis, which handles clients like Coca-Cola, Milky Way and TWA, were left scratching their heads about all those dot-com ads the day after the Super Bowl.

"We got together to look at all the Super Bowl advertising. We watched it as a group the next day, and we were pretty much unimpressed," says Mike Flynn, a senior account planner.

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