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The Super Bowl is coming, and the buzz for the past two weeks has centered around what viewers will and won’t see. You will see: Terrell Owens sporting new ankle hardware; a cringe-worthy half-time show; and some of the priciest commercials ever, with ads going for $80,000 a second. Here’s what you won’t see: A close final score; a cringe-worthy Janet Jackson dress being used to open a Budweiser; a clergyman lusting after a pickup truck; and Mickey Rooney’s bare behind.

Those last three were featured in commercials that Fox Sports decided were too risqué for prime time. The Bud spot purports to show how last year’s “wardrobe malfunction” happened; the Rooney ad is for a cold remedy and takes place in a sauna. They’ll be AWOL from the airwaves during the game, but they could have capitalized on their moment in the headlines—if advertisers were more amenable to the notion of integrating their Web and TV advertising.

“These cancelled ads picked up a lot of buzz just by virtue of being turned down,” says Peter Hershberg, a principal with Internet marketing firm Reprise Media. “The companies could have gained visibility with a search engine campaign that led people to click through to the ads on the Web. That would cost pennies per click, versus millions to shoot the commercials.”

But despite the phenomenal growth of the SEM industry in the last two years, few Super Bowl sponsors have bothered to tie their megabuck television spots to a keyword search as basic as “Company name + Super + Bowl”, according to Hershberg. Both Volvo and Cadillac have paid for ad placement against the terms. So has People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, whose ads link to a proposed Super Bowl spot—also rejected-- that links eating meat to impotence.

Two factors lie behind what Hershberg sees as a persistent blindness of national advertisers to the significance of search marketing: a confusion about the consumer’s process in searching the Web, and the traditional divide between online and offline advertising.

“Advertising a URL is one way to get traffic, but by far the most popular way people get to a Web site is through search engines,” Hershberg says. Today’s Web searchers are more qualified than many advertisers think, because the process of searching has led them to refine their decisions about what they want from a search.

Then too, a lot of advertisers work with a variety of agencies, and often there’s little to no communication among them. “A national brand may have a main ad agency that’s responsible for television spots, print ads and so on, and then work with somebody completely different for online,” he says. “These two agencies may never speak to one another, so the people handling the online ads do essentially nothing to leverage what the company is doing in the offline world.”

This disconnect may be especially evident when a big brand does something that makes national news. Hershberg points to Coca-Cola’s introduction of its low-carb C2 brand in April 2004. On the day of the launch, he went to the major search engines to gauge Coke’s use of either paid or organic search for C2—and found nothing.

“The company had done zero to buy advertising against the name of its new brand,” he says. “And the only organic listings we found were news stories from sites such as CNN announcing the launch. But there was no cohesion between the launch and any search marketing campaign.”

Hershberg says his company has begun working very closely with clients to integrate their Internet marketing with offline campaigns. “Previously, some of them would really heavy up on TV ads without telling us about the buys or what the messaging was,” he says. “As a result, we’d see online activity that we couldn’t account for or take advantage of.” Now Reprise makes sure that a client who has another agency handling broadcast, print or even other Internet advertising keeps all parties informed about the message being delivered in other media.

Search engine marketing has proven it can work. Now it’s a matter of making it work in harness with the other, more traditional ways to advertise a brand, product or service. “It doesn’t matter how broad the appeal of the event is,” Hershberg says. “If there’s an audience out there that you’re trying to reach that could potentially go online to find information, it makes sense to position your advertising in search engines and make sure search is integrated into your campaign.”