It was a particularly happy Thanksgiving last year for the sales team at Fox Sports, and not because they were broadcasting a game between the Green Bay Packers and a Detroit Lions team that, shockingly, had not yet been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. The reason for the corporate joy: More than two months before Super Bowl XLII, all but two of Fox’s 63 in-game commercial slots had been sold, and for record rates. This was a dramatic improvement from the previous few Super Bowl broadcasts, when networks were peddling their discounted inventory right up to the moment the big game's performer du jour was carted out to butcher the national anthem.

You’ve probably heard the ad numbers for this year’s game: Brands are spending up to $2.7 million for a 30-second spot on the February 3 broadcast, tossing at least $150 million into the pockets of Rupert Murdoch and the National Football League. According to Lou D’Ermilio, senior vice president of media relations at Fox Sports, selling out a Super Bowl at unprecedented prices while leaves were still on the trees in Manhattan was, well, unprecedented. Even taking global warming into account, this autumnal windfall has to be good news for big-time, big-brand, TV-heavy advertising, right?

It is, until you stop to wonder why. Why, this year in particular, were the megabrands so quick to commit to spending more money on 30 seconds of network airtime than it cost to produce most of the films being screened at Sundance? Advertisers sure aren’t splurging because of a robust economy, as they did in prewar, pre-Nipplegate, dotcom-infatuated 1999. No, they are going for broke this year because they’re desperate.

At first glance, that doesn’t make sense. After all, this is advertising’s biggest day of the year, and with the generous cooperation of the matchup gods, it may be its biggest day ever. What’s so desperate about that? What’s not to like about 93 million captive viewers, a third of them women, in more than 63 percent of American homes—all of them not just watching the ads, but anticipating, embracing (to the tune of 99.6 percent audience commercial retention—i.e., those who stick around for the whole thing), and critiquing them?

But take a look at what’s happening in Ad Land on the 364 days of the year that don’t feature an N.F.L. title game: Commercials are not discussed by consumers; they are treated with disgust—something to be zapped, TiVo’d, or DVR’d into oblivion. On those 364 days, many TV programs won’t be watched live; they’ll be watched whenever the viewer gets around to it, sometimes on a screen smaller than a Post-it.

On February 3, network TV could set a one-day viewership record, but on February 4—and on every subsequent day until next year’s game—viewership will revert to its ratings tailspin. Throw in a Writers Guild strike that has pretty much killed the new network season and it becomes glaringly obvious why brands with a big, timely story to tell gobbled up Super Bowl ad slots much earlier than usual this year. They had no choice.

“With the uncertainty in prime time, there’s definitely been a trend to advertise with live sports and megaevents,” says Tom McGovern, U.S. director of sports media for Optimum Sports, which buys ad time for Super Bowl perennial Pepsico. “Major brands need major outlets with mass reach to launch new products and campaigns. The Super Bowl is the best—and one of the last—places to make that kind of splash.”

Which explains why Cars.com, sister company of 2007 Super Bowl ad alum Careerbuilder.com and one of the few Super Bowl advertisers that hasn’t concealed its plans like a (pre-Valerie Plame) C.I.A. operative, is jumping on board for the first time this year with two 30-second ads. That buy is noteworthy to media and Wall Street types because the company’s brand name ends with “dot” and “com,” and it’s vital to Cars.com because a Super Bowl launch puts it in the year’s biggest show for its prime audience, auto dealers.

That large, captive audience is also why you will probably see more movie trailers this year than you’ve ever seen during a Super Bowl broadcast. Last year, there were four; this year, Fox has already booked 12. While trailers aren’t the kind of ads that will be passionately discussed in the blogosphere, they’ll be all over the game because of three letters: DVR. “If you’ve got a movie opening on a fixed date, you can’t wait seven days for people to look at your trailer,” says D’Ermilio at Fox Sports. “The Super Bowl is 100 percent DVR-proof.”

It is a popularly held belief that the Super Bowl ads of a given year reflect the zeitgeist of the day. This claim is generally supported with the usual suspects: Budweiser’s lizards (1997) taking the piss out of the concept of corporate spokespeople (the frogs) by trying to kill them; or Apple’s Orwellian, Ridley Scott-directed classic “1984” (1984); or the series of White House Office of National Drug Control spots (2002) that linked smoking marijuana to, among other things, terrorism.

The commercial that perhaps best captured the American economic zeitgeist was E-Trade’s 1999 dancing monkey spot, which perfectly summed up the unbridled enthusiasm of the dotcom era when it proclaimed, “We just wasted $2 million. What are you doing with your money?” That statement, according to Corey Rakowsky, an associate creative director at Young & Rubicam Advertising, “made us feel for the first and perhaps last time that money isn’t so serious.” For the record, money spent on commercials started becoming serious again weeks after the following year’s Super Bowl; seven dotcoms ran ads during that game—and the Nasdaq began its historic crash several weeks later.

But rather than looking for deep cultural meaning in a beer commercial, perhaps one can glean more-revealing insights by examining a relatively new phenomenon: the second life of ads that didn’t make it onto the Super Bowl broadcast yet have found a huge audience nonetheless.

As with most ad agencies, at DDB Chicago, which is doing the Cars.com ads as well as much of this year’s Bud Light campaign, hundreds of concepts are pitched internally for every one Super Bowl spot that airs. Up to several dozen of the best ideas are storyboarded and then shown to the client in several rounds of meetings. The work that survives the review by the client (and the franchisees, and the company’s board, and the C.E.O.’s mistress) goes on to several stages of testing to make sure that it hits all the right brand-differentiating notes and has the creative juice of a Super Bowl spot. Cars.com tested a spot this year called “Magic Mushrooms” that DDB Chicago’s Super Bowl vet Mark Gross quite liked, but, alas, the focus group—the people on the other side of the two-way mirror—did not. You will not be seeing “Magic Mushrooms” on the Super Bowl broadcast or anywhere.

Not long ago, spots that were rejected by a client or didn’t test well would be stuck in a dark drawer, never to be seen again. But rejected now doesn’t necessarily mean dead, it merely means forbidden, and if YouTube, iFilm, and other viral video sites that run Super Bowl almosts are an indicator, forbidden means watch me again and again and again. (For a look at some Super Bowl rejects, click here.)

Bud Light is the king of Super Bowl ads, having run seven of last year’s 10 most memorable spots, according to USA Today’s Super Bowl Ad Meter (which equips 238 adults with handheld meters in Houston and McLean, Virginia, and puts the fate of billions of dollars of brand equity in their hands), but it has also claimed the crown for aired-only-online spots. Consider, for instance, its banned 2007 “Bottle Opener” and “Skinny Dip” ads, which have been viewed more than 800,000 and 650,000 times, respectively, on YouTube. Or its “Wardrobe Malfunction” spot, which was going to air the year after Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl debacle before the network nixed it. Last year, Bud Light’s “Swear Jar” commercial never made it on air, but millions have seen its extended-play version online. (A cautionary note about trolling for ads on the internet: You may experience the curious phenomenon of having to watch a commercial you don’t want to watch before viewing the one you do want to see—ads sponsoring ads.)

Some marketers now create risqué ads knowing they will be rejected and thereby become eligible for the golden “banned Super Bowl ad” label that will make them viral classics. Consider PETA’s disturbing 2006 “Got Milk” Girls Gone Wild spoof, or Airborne’s 2005 “Sauna” spot. Granted, Mickey Rooney is adorable, but did Airborne really think Fox was going to make 93 million people look at his bare, octogenarian ass?

Online, any commercial tagged banned or uncensored Super Bowl commercial will do exponentially better than one that aired. The exception to this rule is Britney Spears’ 2002 Super Bowl extravaganza for Pepsi. In the past year, more than 3 million people have viewed it on YouTube, which one would think is a good thing for a brand. But in light of Ms. Spears’ recent exploits, someone at Pepsi has to be wondering if the sodamaker should be the first company to ban its own ad from the internet.

What does the online proliferation of banned Super Bowl ads say about American consumers? That we want to see what has been kept from us, for starters. And that in their current state, TV commercials, even the highly anticipated Super Bowl ads, do not go far enough.

So what can we expect this year? Will the 60-plus ads on Super Bowl Sunday in any way reflect the zeitgeist or the health of the economy? Or merely the superegos of a handful of mostly white admen working with multimillion-dollar production budgets at a handful of very large advertising agencies?
Of course, Bud will do it’s thing. And Pepsico will be back in a big way. Perhaps, since the game is two days before the Super Tuesday primaries, a candidate will step up and throw a $2.7 million Hail Mary.

Also, expect another digital menagerie of furry animals, scruffy-faced men who say “dude” a lot, too much scatological humor, and several cloying nods to the green movement. Expect way too many testosterone-filled trailers and at least one pharmaceutical company demonstrating that while using gratuitous sex to sell a product is a Super Bowl no-no, using a product to sell gratuitous sex is more than just fine; it may help you crack the Ad Meter’s Top 10.

Perhaps somewhere in the upcoming four-hour storm of ads, some nugget will emerge—hell, maybe it will pop up in a viewer comment for a banned ad—that will help someone somewhere figure out how to make advertising matter the other 364 days of the year.

James P. Othmer is the author of the novel The Futurist, and is currently writing an advertising memoir, The Death of Darrin Stephens.