Dockers' Free Pants Spot: Hit or Miss?

(MyFOX NATIONAL) - (MyFOX NATIONAL) -- One thousand free pairs of pants -- that's the hook and the fact that the Super Bowl spot included a collection of pantsless men marching across an open field. Dockers' "Wear the Pants" campaign was given the mother of all spotlights Sunday night and the reviews were rocky.

Assuming the marketing goal here was to entertain, it seems the no-pants spot flopped.

"While the CareerBuilder ad where a raft of extremely unattractive coworkers wore only underwear on "casual Fridays" was humorous, the Dockers "Men without pants" ad, aired immediately afterward, was just puzzling," posted one blogger on buffalonews.com. "How would a bunch of guys trooping around sans pants sell pants?"

Some were disappointed, like Debra D. Bass of stltoday.com , but more for the allegedly sexist statement the message implies. "Men need to be comfortable in their own skin and comfortable sharing control with women. If financial or mental superiority is your litmus test for manhood, then wearing pants is the least of your worries."

And still others, like tampabay.com , were more straightforward. "The Dockers commercial with the men walking around with no pants wasn't funny. It was gross."

But what if the goal of this spot was not to entertain, but to simply sell pants. By that measure it appeared to be right on target, lighting up Google with requests searching for the free-pants offer that closed the commercial. And by registering for the giveaway, Dockers captures a ton of new e-mail addresses to market to in the coming year.

Even if the spot is gross, sexist and puzzling -- the pants-wearing folks who booked the spot got their money's worth.