O.K., as much as I hate to admit it, I was wrong. The Tennessee Titans didn’t pull off a last minute coup to win the Super Bowl. But, I am definitely giving &uot;Air&uot; McNair an A for effort.

Besides the fact that I actually enjoy the Super Bowl, I would have to also admit that I like to see the new commercials. When you consider that those spots sell for $400,000 and some for even more you begin to see the power of advertising.

Some years the new commercials are better than others. I think the most famous ones to date, or maybe just my favorite, are the Budweiser frogs.

I know, I know, by making them cute and hilarious it makes them more familiar to children. And with underage drinking being such a problem, that is probably not a good thing.

I found this year’s commercials to be very different; actually I found some of them to downright strange.

The majority of the advertisers seemed to online businesses, which I find kind of ironic. They have to advertise on television to get you to look at their Web sites and the advertisements on them.

I completely missed the meaning of the cowboys riding the range with the herd of cats. This was evidently thought up by a room full of Generation X’ers, who are much more advanced in their thinking than I.

There was another one that I found rather distasteful. No cursing and no nudity were on it. This one showed an elderly man, a chimpanzee and an obviously mentally disabled man, all sitting in front of a garage. All I could gather from the commercial was that using that particular online business is so easy that even those three individuals could do it.

To me that was a little over the edge. It was kind of like the first time I heard a curse word on a children’s animated movie. (There are three such words in &uot;Antz.&uot;)

I guess I am curious as to whether anyone else was caught off-guard by this new age of advertising. It has been the topic of discussion at several places I have been since Sunday evening.

It would seem to me that there should be guidelines for commercials that are the same as the ones for regular shows. If a regular television show said or made the same implication as that on-line company’s advertisements did … well, all you-know-what would break lose.

Perhaps there are consumers out there who want to be told that by using a product they are superior to other people. But I think often times big companies miss the boat on this subject. I think what most of us want is to be correctly informed without being belittled or having to watch others be mistreated.

Christina Hall is the lifestyle editor at The Democrat. She can be reached at 445-3549 or by e-mail at christina.hall @natchezdemocrat.