• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, January 16, 2015

I’ve been thinking that with just 15 ad-hyping days ‘til the Super Bowl, things have been a little on the quiet side. “Big Car Makers Absent From Super Bowl” is a dull headline, and this fresh-off-the-Internet sneak peek at the Bud Light ad has me just a tiddly-taddly underwhelmed.

So I thank Mean Joe Greene and everyone else who is holy for news today that YouTube is staging its own halftime show, in competition with Katy Perry and Lenny Kravitz, and hundreds of kids marching around and then, spontaneously, gyrating in a wholesome, American, non-sexual kind of way. Ah, I can see it now -- like I saw it last year and the year before.

It’s true. Things were better in the Nip Slip era. (at about 4 minutes in, if you’re that interested).

The tedium of halftime is probably what YouTube execs thought too, when they hit on the halftime competition, first reported by Bloomberg. YouTube visitors spent 6.3 million hours watching Super Bowl commercials, most of which are now released days or weeks before the big game.  

So getting a crowd over there at halftime should be no problem. And nowadays, YouTube has growing competition for advertisers with Faceboook and Twitter, so this isn’t just fun and games.

The halftime show, produced by YouTube and Collective Digital Studio, will be hosted by Harley Morenstein of the food goof Epic Meal Time, and will feature music and fake Super Bowl ads, and bits by YouTubers like Freddie Wong and Toby Turner. That halftime show is on top of YouTube’s continuing AdBlitz channel that YouTube puts together every year as a special place for Super Bowl advertisers to showcase their creations, for which they are paying up to $4.5 million-per-.30 to show during the game. 

Viewers then vote for their favorites.  

So far AdBlitz is just teasing ads from three sponsors and featuring a fake ad (not that hot) from Mars Rising.  

A Super Bowl advertising clearinghouse from iSpot.tv is not much better with new stuff at this point. AdAge has its ongoing chart of who’s in-and-what they’re doing that seems authoritative in a World War II troop movement kind of way.

I’m waiting for YouTube. Its halftime diversion should drag in some portion of the millions of viewers who are seemingly required to watch the SuperBowl. Last year, there were nearly 111 million of you, in 53 million households, so even getting a sliver of the sizable number of the Only Watch the Commercials crowd could be good. And without the painful Bud Bowl, which passed out of existence as a halftime diversion in 1997, the most major competition is probably biological. I’d say -- go for it.