Super Bowl Commercials: The Best & The Worst

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It's the one day out of the year that I hit record on the ole tele specifically to watch the commercials as opposed to the usual reason - to skip past them. Last night's close game and down to the wire victory was interesting, but in between rushes and touchdowns there were some great ads, and as always, there were some bombs, but they all kept us glued to the screen.

The Super Bowl commercials this year ranged from the thoughtful (Pepsi's "Refresh Anthem" or Coke's "Avatars") to the absolutely hilarious (the Baby E-Trade commercials always rank up there in my mind). Every year USA Today sets up an Ad Meter where America gets a chance to play Siskel and Ebert with the game's commercials by assigning a stars value to each ad. This year 50 of the 62 spots were put up to rank on the newspaper's Ad Meter, and the number one ad chosen by viewers was the Doritos "Crystal Ball" spot (you can check that out on the Video tab. The crystal ball commercials had me laughing out loud, but in my opinion the Clydesdale fetching the tree trunk is running a very close second for the best commercial. I guess I'm not alone in that thought because Super bowl Ads Fanhouse has that fetch commercial rated as number one, and the Cheetos "Gossip girl" commercial as number two.

The worst ad from this year is shaping up to be the Vizio commercials (you can also check that out on the the Video tab. I am wondering if Vizio is loosing merely because you had to be in St. Louis to see that terrible dancing football player ad that Mcbride and Sons subjected the metro are to just after half-time. While the Vizio commercial was bad, I think even the 3-D glasses couldn't have saved that Sobe commercial. While the dancing lizards were a little lame last year, the football players doing ballet with the lizards were completely lame this year.

This year's commercials set companies back a cool 3 mill for a 30 second spot, or $100,000 per second. They got a little more bang for their buck this year though since sll of the ad spots were put on NBC's video website, Hulu, for those who didn't want to sit through the actual game or those who feel like reliving the commercial glory.

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