When Harold Daniel tapes the Super Bowl each year, it’s not to be able to relive the athletic drama that has taken place on the playing field.

He admits to being only a casual football fan, after all, especially when he doesn’t have a favorite team in the game.

For Daniel, a marketing professor at the University of Maine, Monday morning quarterbacking is all about reviewing the Super Bowl commercials – not just how they might entertain us while the Sunday game is under way, but how well they manage to make us want to buy the products they pitch long after the final whistle.

“The Super Bowl is one of the last real venues to draw enormous audiences globally, and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger,” said Daniel, who has worked in marketing and market research for Campbell’s Soup, General Foods and the Burke company, which first came up with the idea of calling people the day after an ad runs to see what they remembered of it. “People will say that $2.5 million for a 30-second ad is such a lot of money, but if you have the distribution – and it can often be international these days – the cost per thousand can actually be quite reasonable.”

Daniel, who uses the Super Bowl tape as a teaching tool in his classroom, said the most effective ads each year are those that not only find clever, humorous or poignant ways to stop some 750 million worldwide viewers in their tracks, but keep their attention riveted long enough to register the brand name on their football-fevered brains.

Based on that criteria, the professor gave high marks to this year’s ads for Disney World, a humorous look at athletes rehearsing just the right way to say they’re going to the family theme park.

He also highly rated the Bud Light commercials featuring the “magic fridge” on a revolving door that cleverly conceals a young man’s precious supply of beer from thirsty friends while inadvertently providing it to his most appreciative neighbors in the adjoining apartment.

The Dove ad, Daniel said, was a good example of a company imparting an important social message – uncharacteristic Super Bowl fare, to be sure – and selling its good name and skin-product line by subtle association.

“That ad was the most distinctive,” Daniel said of the Dove spot, which promoted self-esteem for young girls who think, for whatever reasons, they may not be thin enough or pretty enough. “It was emotional and poignant, and hit a different area of the psyche than, say, the Bud Light ads, which were some of the best of the day.”

Daniel thought the touching ad about the young Clydesdale horse that dreams of pulling the Budweiser wagon on his own was an especially “warm and fuzzy way” of selling the familiar beer name.

“We’re finding that these kinds of ads are very effective in achieving memorability,” he said.

Daniel not only uses the Super Bowl commercials to teach his students the best marketing methods, he shows them what not to do as well.

A good case in point, he said, might be the GoDaddy.com ad, which attempted to put a new spin on Janet Jackson’s now-infamous Super Bowl half-time “wardrobe malfunction” of two years ago. In Sunday’s ad, the tank-top straps of a buxom young woman begin to snap in a courtroom, causing the judge to reach for an oxygen mask to ease his hyperventilation.

“Partly it was in bad taste,” he said, “and it also ran the risk of alienating half the population. Lots of businesspeople are women, and they might have been offended by it.”

And while Daniel thought the Hummer ad was effective in a quirky way – Godzilla and a giant robot face off to fight, fall in love instead and produce a four-wheeled offspring by commercials’ end – he’s not sure if most viewers caught the name of their “little monster.”

“It was unusual,” Daniel conceded, “but the average person may not have stayed with the ad long enough to find out it was a Hummer.”

These days, he said, with TV markets so fragmented, and the big three networks no longer capable of monopolizing the attention of audiences as they once had, an advertiser’s worst enemy is the remote control.