A month after the game, DMBB St. Louis surveyed 1,000 adults, and found 357 who'd watched at least three-quarters of the Super Bowl. Only 17 percent of those could name a single dot-com that had advertised during the game without any prompting. Not a single person remembered seeing ads from AutoTrader.com, Britannica.com, Computer.com, DowJones.com, Epidemic.com, kforce.com, LifeMinders, Netpliance, OnMoney.com. OurBeginning.com or Healtheon/WebMD without prompting.

Some of the companies that had done a lot of commercials before the game like Pets.com, Monster.com and E-Trade fared better. A whopping 6 percent of those surveyed remembered seeing an E-Trade ad. That was the big winner. Even with prompting, only 4 percent could recall Epidemic.com's creepy ad, which employed a sickening germ metaphor to invite viewers to send spam to friends.

The problem may not have been entirely with the somewhat loopy creativity in the ads themselves, which have been endlessly critiqued, rated and dissected.

Nigel Carr, the general manager of Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners West, an ad agency, says that in this year's Super Bowl the flood of dot-coms basically succeeded in drowning out each other. "Like everything in advertising, someone does something differently, and it works incredibly well because no one else is doing it, and then everyone rushes to copy it, and it stops working because everyone is doing it. That's basically the history of advertising in a nutshell."

USC's Stewart says that the dot-com ad rush -- Net companies spent $3.1 billion on offline advertising last year alone, according to Competitive Media Reporting -- parallels what happened historically in other "overcapitalized industries" like railroads, the telegraph, radio and TV, where new innovations caused a surge of money, and then of promotion to flood the markets with competing messages. "It's not really a unique phenomenon," he says. "It just happens to be the one that's happening today."

Mantra number one: Cut through the clutter

Still, the companies most of us had never heard of before, and may never hear from again, defend the Super Bowl as just the thing for them. "It's probably the only event where people turn on the game, not just to see the game but to see the advertising. We knew that we could rise above a lot of the clutter out there," says David Miranda, CEO of LastMinuteTravel.com.

Jim Blumenfeld, the CEO of OnMoney.com, a site designed to help you manage your money, says the same thing: "We feel we've broken through a lot of the clutter."

And the gyrations in the market don't phase any of these fearless entrepreneurs either. "There are a lot of companies that are probably thinking about it, if they haven't already pulled out of their marketing spends," says a pleased Blumenfeld. "It reduces the clutter out there and it could ultimately be a huge opportunity for us."

Mantra number two: Look under the hood

Budowski of OurBeginning.com is equally enthusiastic about the market drop. "It actually helps us," says Budowski, who plans to have a public offering by the end of this year. "People are going to become more selective and start looking under the hood and saying -- 'Hey, what's in there?' We think we have a real company."

The funny thing is that so does everyone else -- about their own company, that is. Ford of Computer.com says: "There are a lot of quasi-business models, marketing plans masquerading as companies out there, and we're scaling up to be a long-term company." This, from a site that is a computer news and shopping site for newbies.

Miranda of LastMinuteTravel.com, who also plans on an IPO before year's end, says that a shakeout is inevitable, and "I'm happy to see it happen. What's happening in the dot-com world, if you look under the hood of some of these companies, what you see are some business models that are very suspect. You can't just put a dot-com on the end of everything. You have to separate the good ideas from the hype."

Did someone gives these guys a script with the words "under the hood" in it? Maybe it also had stage directions sending them all to advertise in the Super Bowl. Hmm, will it be picked up by entrepreneurs next year -- giving us cause to rename Super Bowl XXXV as SuperBowl.com?

"That's anybody's guess. Look at the stock market -- you don't know how many dot-coms are going to be around next year," says Flynn of DMBB.

Such talk certainly doesn't rankle this year's Super Bowl cast. Ever the unflappable entrepreneur, Computer.com's Ford forges down the IPO road with no regrets about the one-day multimillion-dollar ad orgy. Though he has nothing to show for his flash of cash, except the free press (yes, including this article!) -- he says: "We were very pleased with the results. The Super Bowl was a huge success for us. No one had heard of us before. Now, we have not only a national brand, but an international brand."

Media Metrix be damned. Maybe tens of millions of football fanatics the world over do have that generic URL, Computer.com, inextricably commingled with their misty memories of Super Bowl XXXIV.

They'd better. Ford, who's busily raising his next pile of dough, admits that he won't be doing a "huge marketing campaign" anytime soon. "Based on what happened with the stock market in the last couple of weeks, we're looking to do more targeted marketing."

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