During last year’s Super Bowl, Best Buy tried to use not-at-all-a-flash-in-the-pan teen star Justin Bieber and slurring punchline Ozzy Osbourne in a failed attempt to announce its Buy Back upsell program that we’ve barely heard about since. For this Sunday’s big ad the retailer, inspired by the death of Steve Jobs and the fact that people seemed to like him, has turned to tech innovators to convince customers it’s not just a showroom for Amazon and Newegg.

“That service side of the business is where they’re trying to position themselves,” one analyst tells Bloomberg about Best Buy’s Super Bowl spot. “The fight they are fighting is against the mass merchants and the online merchants.”

To combat “showrooming,” Best Buy says it is showing a renewed focus on customer service, training employees on how to show customers the way in which their various electronic device communicate and work with each other.

“We have to make bigger visible leaps in our customer service,” said a Best Buy executive, presumably right before he tried to sell reporters an extended warranty.

Bloomberg reports on the tech types that have been drafted to vouch for Best Buy on Sunday:

The Super Bowl commercial, airing in the first quarter of the Feb. 5 game, will spotlight inventors such as Philippe Kahn, who developed one of the first camera phones. Another is Kevin Systrom, who developed a free photo-sharing application called Instagram introduced on Apple’s app store in 2010.

“Big brands like to hire celebrities,” explained another Best Buy suit to Bloomberg. “We looked at everyone from George Clooney to Stephen Colbert. We believe the inventors are more than enough. I give those 125 million viewers a lot of credit. I think they’ll appreciate the story.”

Bieber No Steve Jobs as Best Buy Remakes Ads [Bloomberg]

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.