My favorite Superbowl spots, courtesy of YouTube

Go YouTube. This page of Superbowl ads is a thing of viral marketing beauty.

My favorites?

6. Snickers


5. Rock, Papers, Scissors -- Bud Lite
One of the first commercial was also one of the best.


4. Coca-cola

Give a little love and it all comes back to you. How Lennon.

3. Wittiest title nominee: Connectile Disfunction (Sprint Mobile Broadband). The commercial isn't otherwise remarkable but that initial cleverness sold me. Mostly.


2. The K-Fed National Insurance ad. Tough call, but seriously, what other ad is generating more buzz?


1. The Robert Goulet appearance in Emerald Nuts actually made me LOL. There it is.


The worst? I love Garmin products, but this was just a mindblowing waste of 2.6 million dollars:


Ditto for SalesGenie:

Like the 2000 Superbowl ad season but perhaps even worse.

Update: Gizmodo posts on the SuperBowl ads more extensively -- and with awards, no less. GizFunny. Of note is that the iFilms render and play much more smoothly, IMHO.

Update II: The lonely GM robot was sadly overlooked. Score another one for anthropomorphizing our machines.


Update III: Embarrassment descends. I've been given a scathing dressing down for overlooking the Blockbuster spot that has some priceless neoLuddite humor that provoked a belly laugh. I don't know how I forgot to include this....too much time fussing over crab cakes, clearly. I think I even prefer this over Goulet.

"BrewTube"

NYTimes writers are getting pretty cute with article titles -- but then, we all have to these days. This "BrewTube" article from the pages of the Old Grey Lady's magazine is once again well calibrated to the moment. It will arrive on the doorsteps of readers preparing to watch the SuperBowl of ads (along with Da Bears and the Colts), at least one of which was completely crowdsourced.

Bud.tv, however, is neither cute not a joke, though there are funny things to be found there. In effect, Anheuser-Busch has created its own online cable network, though for now pretty interface houses commercials, trailers and little else -- promises of enhanced content and shows are still coming soon.

If this campaign works for them, I imagine this accelerate the trend of companies creating online communities of users, customers or clients as a means of building both brand awareness and loyalty.

I think it will take much more than this for me to prefer a Bud over a Guinness, Belgian or homebrew.

Instantly one of my favorite commercials ever: Bruce Campbell on the value of experience

I watched this for the first time on Sunday and was just reminded of it by coworkers. C'est voila: of course it's available on YouTube. Aside from Bruce Campbell, who I'll always regards with great geeky respect for his work on the Evil Dead trilogy -- especially "Army of Darkness" -- there's great writing and the longest sailing ship I've ever seen. There's a wonderful subtle element to the commercial as well, as the background behind Campbell just wraps and wraps, implying that he's in a sealed room, albeit one decorated in a distinctly old-school man-study kind of way, and therefore has no experience of the wide world. That it's a commercial for Old Spice is probably beside the point. This is just pure celluloid joy.