Anyone who’s received a personal email from me knows my signature states that “Kit Kiefer invented the snarky retort when editing Baseball Cards magazine in 1987.”

That’s sort of a cinema vérité snarky retort, because I was merely following in the footsteps of Car And Driver and several other magazines that were taking a less-than-inverted-pyramid approach to journalism.

“The New Journalism,” it was called, and if we knew then what we know now we would have stuck to our AP Stylebooks, because the progeny of our snarky little retorts are all over the internet, and they’re not pretty.

Still, every now and then a quasi-news organization gets it right, to the benefit of the multitudes, and this past week it was Deadspin.

If you haven’t heard of Deadspin – and a surprising number of people haven’t – it’s a sports site, one of the Gizmodo family of sites that cover everything from food to cars to video games.

Gizmodo sites have a fair amount of cheekiness, especially when it comes to headlines. The quintessential Gizmodo headline is a nice, long whine punctuated by a kick in the teeth.

When it works it’s a thing of beauty, and it’s never worked better than on a story about the blatant SEO-jacking tactics many major sites practice in advance of the Super Bowl.

That story’s headline: “At What Time Does ‘What Time Does The Super Bowl Start?’ Start?”

You get what Deadspin is doing: They’re criticizing these sites’ brazen SEO pandering by hitting them with an even more brazen pander. And it’s perfect.

The body of the story keeps up the attack, too:

“The time has come once again for the ‘big game,’ the football-related contest that surrounds every first Sunday of February, the race to the top for the big trophy. That trophy is, of course, dominance over other grimy web publications who engage in the now-annual, semi-hallowed practice of debasing themselves at the feet of the SEO gods in hopes of a firehose’s worth of curious Super Bowl viewers trying to find out what time the dang game starts.

“This blog post you are reading now will unfortunately not tell you what time the game starts—you’re an adult, you can figure this out on your own—but it will chronicle, as ever, the answer to the real question: What time does ‘What time does the Super Bowl start?’ start? …

“(A note on some participants, especially CBS Sports: It seems that several articles are simply being republished everyday with a new timestamp, or have at least been updated and pushed out again. Somehow the same three CBS Sports blogs are showing up as distinct stories in a Google search more than 20 times …)”

For those of you reading that and asking yourself, “Is this what we’ve come to?” I have an answer: Yes.

And no. Good marketing is not and will never be playing the “What time does the Super Bowl start?” game, or hundreds of related games. This is bad marketing, and if you think this sort of dragon-chasing is good marketing, shame on you.

I know some very good marketing professionals who have been shoehorned into playing bad-marketing games; I’ve had to play them myself, and every time I do I have to put on headphones to drown out the sounds of my own screams and the unmistakable sound of fingernails on a blackboard that accompanies every re-read.

And what makes it even more galling is this: Imagine if those resources had been put into treating your customers better, and making them happy advocates of your product or service. Then you wouldn’t be just another goldfish in the tank rushing to the top every time that yummy fish food is sprinkled on the water. No sirree; you’d be eating filet mignon, baby, and savoring every bite.

Well, maybe not. But you’d be a happier marketer, your customers would be happier, and your co-workers would be happier, too, and that’s way better than fish food.

To return to the question that brought us here, what time does the Super Bowl start? I don’t know; I didn’t pay attention. And I didn’t care; I ran my own little NFL boycott this season. So maybe all that SEO-jacking was sort of a waste, huh?

Hey, but feel free to try again next year. And frankly, the SEO Bowl will probably be more interesting than the obligatory Kia commercial or yet another dull, grinding Patriots game.

And keep that headline set in agate, Deadspin. Double-truck. You’re gonna need it.

At What Time Does ‘What Time Does The Super Bowl Start?’ End?