Best Super Bowl ad - for football fans

The ads from this year's Super Bowl have charged a range of emotions and in some cases appear to have clouded all judgement. Of course, deciding which ad is best is like ranking the NFL's greatest ever teams: it's a completely arbitrary exercise with inherent biases. What makes a commercial good anyway? Its originality? Its artistry? Whether it makes you laugh or cry? Whether you recall the product thirty minutes later? Because it features dogs? Maybe its all of the above.

It's been reported that 111 million people watched the big game Sunday, so we can safely assume that at least a few of these people saw the ads. And apparently, as reported by Clickz, the dancing M&Ms effort was the most Tweeted. It was also rated as the most effective by other industry measures. But can we really ever know the effectiveness of an ad? While numbers reveal instant reaction, surely each commercial has a different impact on the subconscious down the road, long after the final whistle of Super Sunday.

For what it's worth, I think the NFL's Evolution ad was among the most memorable, uptempo, nostalgic, colorful, creative and certainly appealing for traditional football fans. This was a full blown scrimmage, after all, and deserved ads with equitable ingenuity; sexualized chocolate and high-IQ dogs won't stick in my mind, I'm afraid.