THE INFORMATION AGE HAS DONE NOTHING if not enhanced the IT vocabulary of the average citizen. Thanks to various sock puppets, herds of cats and a host of other spokesthings, even your auto mechanic probably knows what systems integration means.

Unfortunately, that newfound knowledge may lead to even more people telling CIOs how to do their jobs. For this reason alone, it’s worth taking a look at some of the recent advertising that tech companies are using to spread their information and misinformation.

In truth, the past few months have been sad ones for TV advertising aimed at CIOs. Many of those happy-go-lucky dotcoms that were keeping Madison Avenue so solidly in the black for the past couple of years recently went to the well one more time and fell to the bottom?hard.

In a perfect world, this would mean that tech-company marketing departments had finally realized that spending tens of millions to show off their products to legions of people who couldn’t care less doesn’t make any sense.

But this isn’t a perfect world. The real reason for the recent dearth of tech ads is rapidly shrinking stock prices. Give the Nasdaq a revived pulse, and you’ll undoubtedly see those money sinks reappear.

I know the argument: It’s all about brand recognition. If an ad helps generate just a handful of million-dollar sales, it pays for itself. The problem is, the argument is specious. Do Fortune 1000 companies buy enterprise products because a marketing vice president thinks that a company’s ads are cute or because they made some CFO laugh so hard Chianti came out his nose? I don’t think so. Please correct me if I’m wrong, because I’d love to make sure that my portfolio doesn’t include such companies.

So without further ado, on to the ads.

EDS. "Herding Cats"?which gave us dusty, crusty and heavily scratched cowpokes waxing poetic on the perils and pleasures of bringing free-range felines in from their home on the plains?was a classic. In fact, it was one of last year’s most popular Super Bowl ads, although I doubt one person in 100 could tell you what EDS actually does. This year, the company tried to follow up with the "Running of the Squirrels."

Ha, ha, ha! Ho, ho, ho! Ha. Heh. Oh, heck, it just wasn’t that funny. Plus, while the phrase "hard as herding cats" means something to most people (it’s like hard, ya know?), "running with squirrels" just lies there like a dead musk ox.