The Baltimore Ravens won the game but Super Bowl XLVII was a victory for CBS on Sunday.

With an average overnight household rating of 48.1/71 the game was the highest rated Super Bowl in metered market history. The match-up between the Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers in New Orleans breaks the 47.9/71 record of Super Bowl XLV in 2011.

It’s also up 1% from the 47.8/71 of last year’s New York Giants and New England Patriots game. Super Bowl XLVI on NBC was the most-watched event in U.S. TV history with a total of 111.3 million viewers.

In their ratings today, CBS excluded the 8:45 PM – 9:15 PM power outage period in the Superdome, pulling from the 6:30 – 845 PM Et and 9:15 – 10:45 PM ET slots.

Ratings glory hangs in the balance for CBS’s broadcast of the Super Bowl.

Three years running, the NFL’s championship game has set a viewership record, topped last year by NBC’s broadcast to an average audience of 111.3 million people.

But ratings are a mere point of pride for CBS heading into kickoff. The ads have already been sold (some at more than $4 million a pop), so the network can now only hope to put forth its best broadcast and deflect as much of the Super Bowl glow to its other programs and its cable sports network.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/03/3215030/in-super-bowl-broadcast-cbs-hopes.html

In the world of advertising, there truly is nothing quite like the Super Bowl.

This morning, The Wall Street Journal reported that ad slots for Super Bowl XLVI had officially sold out at an asking price of $3.5 million per 30-second spot. That was up from about $3 million last year. As the paper showed in the chart to the right, the price of advertising during the big game has been rising fairly steadily for the entire past decade, even managing to jump during the economic nightmare year of 2009. Overall, the cost of a commercial is up 59% since 2001.

Why is the most expensive ad space on television getting even costlier? There are a few reasons, but they all boil down to something simple. As audiences have fractured the age of Hulu and DVR, the Super Bowl is among the last of an increasingly endangered species: The truly mass audience live TV event. In good times and bad, that distinction has been worth a premium to advertisers.

Since the turn of the century, the number of Americans watching the Super Bowl has increased every year except 2005 (apparently everyone was sick and tired of watching Tom Brady and the Patriots take home the Lombardi Trophy by then). In 2010, the year the New Orleans Saints beat out the Indianapolis Colts, the game became the most watched broadcast in U.S. history, beating out the record set in 1983 by the series finale of M*A*S*H* Overall, the game’s audience has grown about 28% since 2001.

Not only has the Super Bowl’s raw audience grown, but so has its share of television viewers. According to Nielsen, about 46% of TV households tuned in for last year’s game, up from about 40% in 2001. That’s lower than the its all-time high claim of 49% in 1981, but still remarkable, considering how few events can continue to command that sort of widespread viewership.

It’s not just about how many people watch, though; it’s also about who. The Super Bowl’s audience has money and is young enough to spend it. The game performs strongly in the much coveted 18-49 age demographic, and as Nielsen notes, the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to tune in. Its highest ratings are among families that make $100,000 a year or more.

But there’s another important value proposition in the Super Bowl: People actually care about the ads. Deeply. Think about what you’ll be talking about Monday morning after the game. Unless you’re a dedicated football fan, it’ll probably be the beer commercials. You’ll go back on YouTube and rewatch your favorites, maybe even vote for them in an online poll. Compare that to a regular night spent cycling through your DVR queue and fast forwarding through the commercial breaks. Unsurprisingly, Nielsen has found that Super Bowl ads are 58% more memorable than your average TV spot. The extended lives they live on the web make them all the more valuable. According to the WSJ, Volkswagen claimed that it reaped more than $100 million in free publicity for its adorable ad featuring a little boy dressed at Darth Vader. When you put it in that light, $3.5 million doesn’t seem like such a bad deal.

Read More at : The Atlantic

Read more at: MarketWatch

Sunday evening’s telecast of Super Bowl XLV on Fox was the most watched program in television history, according to preliminary results from the Nielsen Co., breaking the record set by last year’s game.

The thrilling 31-25 victory for the Green Bay Packers over the Pittsburgh Steelers was seen by an average audience of 111 million viewers, breaking the record of 106.5 million set by Super Bowl XLIV, broadcast on CBS (CBS 20.94, +0.11, +0.53%) . In that contest, the New Orleans Saints defeated the Indianapolis Colts 31-17.

More than 53 million households watched this year’s Super Bowl, for a preliminary rating of 46, Nielsen said.

The game was in doubt until less than two minutes remained.

Read More at: Variety

In a season in which the NFL has set new ratings records, the Super Bowl could break the biggest record of all.

With the Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay Packers clinching their berths Sunday, there’s feverish anticipation that the game could topple the record set by the 106.5 million who turned out for last year’s championship between Indianapolis and New Orleans. That game on CBS topped the 1983 finale of “MASH,” also on CBS, as TV’s most-watched program of all time.

The Steelers are among the league’s most popular teams, and few franchises have the tradition of the Packers — even if Brett Favre is no longer leading them. If the ratings for Sunday’s conference championship games are any indication, this Super Bowl should go through the roof. The Steelers’ 24-19 victory over the New York Jets drew a record 54.8 million for CBS, the most ever for an AFC championship. The Packers’ 21-14 win over the Chicago Bears scored 51.9 million viewers for Fox, marking the largest audience ever for the first game on a conference championship Sunday.

The NFL and Fox don’t like to play ratings prognosticator, but clearly the league is excited about this year’s history-rich Super Bowl matchup.

Super Bowl Ads Best Seen Early

The upcoming Super Bowl holds the potential to be a “marketing bonanza,” according to recent research on trends and effectiveness of paid Super Bowl advertising from The Nielsen Company.

Perhaps most significantly, a slight majority of respondents, 51%, said they like the commercials more than the Super Bowl itself. Forty-nine percent of respondents would rather watch the football action.

The Early Bird Catches the Advertising Worm

Super Bowl advertisers looking to maximize audience response to their ads are advised to show them early in the game, preferably the first quarter. In terms of general recall, 69% of viewers remember ads aired during the first quarter. This percentage drops to 67% in the second quarter, 65% in the third quarter, and 58% in the fourth quarter.

Brand linkage shows a similar deterioration as the game progresses. Eighty-six percent link ads they see in the first quarter with the corresponding brands. This percentage drops to 79% in the second quarter, 77% in the third quarter, and 75% in the fourth quarter.

Although a slight majority of viewers watch the Super Bowl more for the ads than the game, likeability ratings of ads shown throughout the telecast are surprisingly low. Ads shown in the first quarter have a 40% likeability rating, which drops to 34% in the second quarter, 31% in the third quarter and 25% in the fourth quarter.

“Even in the Super Bowl, viewers can fall victim to ‘ad fatigue,’ ” said Randall Beard, EVP of Nielsen IAG. “Viewers have difficulty maintaining such a high level of focus for that many ads. It doesn’t matter if the game is a blowout or a nail-biter.”

Super Bowl Ads Can Boost Web Traffic

Super Bowl ads can boost the Web traffic of the companies that run them, especially in the short term. Among all Super Bowl XLIII advertisers in 2009, overnight Web traffic as measured by unique audience grew an average of 63%. Growth in unique audience from January to February 2009 grew an average of 6%.

However, a look at the overnight and monthly performance of some leading web-only companies that advertised during Super Bowl XLIII indicates strong immediate results don’t always last. Monster saw its unique audience grow 70% overnight, but decline 13% between January and February 2009. The one Web-only company that had better January-February growth than overnight growth was Hulu.com, whose overnight traffic grew 59% but monthly traffic grew 104%.

Other Insights

Other insights from Nielsen’s research include:

• A “winning spot” can vary depending on an advertiser’s goals and target demographics.
• In the last five years, the biggest Super Bowl advertiser is Anheuser-Busch, which spent over $100 million on its Bud and Bud Light brands alone.
• Motion pictures form the biggest category of ad spending, which leads to an immediate surge in online buzz for the advertised films.

Advertisers seeking to improve the low likeability ratings of Super Bowl ads should pay attention to recent Nielsen research on the best-liked TV commercials of last year. For the first 11 months of 2009, a 30-second Budweiser ad – in which a Clydesdale fetches a large tree branch – received a likeability index score of 217 and topped the list of favorite commercials. A 30-second spot for Starburst in which a man and a llama feed candy to each other received a score of 204. A Doritos commercial featuring a man throwing a snow globe into a vending machine (193), an ad for Cottonelle with a pampered puppy (191), and Pedigree pet food spot showcasing large and unusual pets (190) rounded out the top five.

Another Budweiser Clydesdale ad, which was 60-seconds long, clocked in at #6, with a score of 186. Starburst also made the list again at #7.

About the Research: Results were based on a sample of more than 25,000 households in Nielsen’s Homescan panel.

NEW YORK The highest rated commercial in Sunday’s down-to-the-wire Super Bowl battle was an ad for Victoria’s Secret, according to Nielsen analysis released today.

The spot was seen by 103.7 million people at 9:44 p.m., near the dramatic conclusion to the game, which aired on Fox. (Viewing numbers provided are based on live plus same day DVR playback viewing.) The average audience throughout the game was a record-setting 97.5 million people in the U.S.

This year’s Super Bowl outcome was decided in the last minute of play and the fourth quarter was the best time for advertisers to be in the contest, at least from a size-of-audience standpoint. Nielsen reports that the top 10 highest rated commercials all exceeded 100 million viewers and all aired after 9 p.m.

The most played-back spot of the game was a Disney ad for the upcoming movie Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, which was viewed by 4.1 million on DVR playback, the ratings company said.

The most buzzed about ad online (per Nielsen BuzzMetrics) was Pepsi’s spot with Justin Timberlake, depicting the pop star’s “magnetic” appeal, accounting for 6.7 percent of Super Bowl online discussion on Sunday. Among Super Bowl advertisers, the fastest-growing Web site was Fox Interactive Media’s MySpace.com/SuperBowlAds, which more than doubled its usual traffic with 900,000 unique visitors.

This year’s Super Bowl aired 50 minutes and 50 seconds of commercial time, including Fox program promos, Nielsen said. Fifty-two unique brands aired commercials for a total of 84 advertisements.

There was a tie for the second-highest rated spot of the game, between an ad for Pespi’s Amp energy drink (man clamps battery cables to his nipples) and a promo for Fox’s American Idol. Those spots aired in succession right after the Victoria’s Secret spot at 9:45 p.m., and garnered an audience of 103.6 million viewers.

E-Trade’s talking baby/clown spot was the fourth most viewed spot of the night, airing at 9:20 p.m. and collecting an audience of 103 million viewers. Back-to-back commercials that ran at 9:26 p.m. — the Bud Light spot with Will Ferrell and a Hyundai Genesis ad — tied for fifth, both seen by 101.5 million viewers.

After Narnia, the most played-back spot was an American Idol promo at 7:39 p.m. (4,069,000). Placing third was a Sobe Life Water spot (dancing lizards) at 7:24 p.m (4,049,000).

via adweek.com

by Joshua Stylman
While football fans everywhere are gathering essential game-day provisions, advertisers are preparing for the biggest media event of the year. With the writers’ strike digging into network ratings, this year’s Super Bowl is more important than ever, as it virtually guarantees advertisers a gargantuan audience – the prospect of which has once again compelled the big spenders to pony up an average of $2.7 million for 30 seconds of air time.

More than any previous year, Super Bowl XLII presents a huge opportunity for advertisers to get the most out of their TV campaigns by treating them as part of a bigger, integrated, cross-channel initiative.

Of the 90 million people who watched last year’s Super Bowl, nearly 18 million – almost 20% – went online to get more information about the ads. Considering that 80% of online sessions start at a search engine, it is crucially important to integrate TV ads into a broader search engine marketing campaign. We’ve monitored the best and worst advertiser performances over the past few years, and have ripped some pages out of our playbook for 2008′s big spenders:

1. Tell viewers where to go, and give them a reason to go there.

Every Super Bowl ad should feature a visibly and audibly prominent URL and a clear and compelling call-to-action. It seems obvious, but is worth stating: marketers must provide direction and incentive to get people interacting with their brands online. Years past have shown that advertisers often drop the ball on this one — nearly one in five ads in the 2007 Super Bowl failed to include a URL, and a whopping 90% lacked a call-to-action. In contrast, Sales Genie, a first time advertiser, prominently featured a URL and a special offer in its ad and drew more than 10,000 online registrations as a result.

2. Make yourself easy to find and to recognize.

Of the 80% of people who begin at the search box, more than 68% never move beyond the first page of results. For Super Bowl advertisers, appearing on the first page of results determines whether consumers ultimately end up at your site or your competitor’s. Smart advertisers will not only buy search ads for brand and Super Bowl related keywords, but they’ll optimize their websites with the same key terms, to ensure that they appear in multiple places on the first page. What’s more, advertisers need to maintain consistent messaging across channels so people recognize online what they saw on TV. This increases the likelihood that viewers will click through an ad and engage with the site.

In 2007, nearly all the advertisers appeared in organic results for their own brand names. But only a quarter of them bid on Super Bowl keywords, squandering their chance to reach eager searchers with a timely, coordinated paid search message.

3. Engage people where they already spend time online.

Both MySpace and YouTube have seen exponential growth over the last few years, and this year they are hosting ads for free on their respective Super Bowl “channels”. Super Bowl advertisers can take advantage of these social hubs by optimizing their own profile pages, uploading ads right after they’ve aired, adding keyword tags to make videos easy to find, allowing users to share and embed videos, and cross-linking back to their own sites. Advertisers should also make sure they capitalize on any pre-Super Bowl buzz during and after the game.

In 2007, Doritos launched a “Crash the Super Bowl” video contest that allowed users to submit original ads that would be aired on game day. By soliciting consumer-generated videos across multiple social media profiles, Doritos built awareness and community in advance of the game. Unfortunately, Doritos fumbled their contest site design, didn’t properly cross-link their social media profiles and neglected to run paid search ads. Though they did receive a good amount of traffic, they could have done more to maximize it.

In sum, this year’s Super Bowl advertisers should not count on just the thirty seconds of viewer attention for which they’ve paid so dearly. It takes a lot longer than half a minute to meaningfully engage a potential customer, and advertisers have the chance to extend that time online. Now we’ll just have to wait and see which of the big players heed our advice to score touchdowns online, and which ones fumble.
via mediapost.com

Super Bowl ads through the ages

A spot cost $1.2 million 10 years ago. Now, it’s $2.6 million. Don’t expect prices to fall anytime soon.

By Paul R. La Monica, CNNMoney.com editor at large

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Indianapolis? Chicago? Who cares? For many, the battle between Anheuser-Busch, FedEx and CareerBuilder for funniest commercial is what matters on Super Bowl Sunday.

The hype around Super Bowl spots has reached a fever pitch this year.

CBS (Charts), which will be broadcasting Super Bowl XLI from Miami on Sunday, is said to be charging as much as a record $2.6 million for a 30-second commercial, up slightly from the $2.5 million Walt Disney (Charts)-owned ABC got for an ad last year.

But it wasn’t that long ago that a 30-second Super Bowl ad cost “just” $1.2 million. That was the going rate for a spot in 1997, according to figures from research firm TNS Media Intelligence. And 10 years earlier, Super Bowl ads cost just $600,000. So the price of a commercial has more than quadrupled in the past twenty years.

And guess what? It’s likely to get even crazier next year with Super Bowl XLII. That’s just the way it is.

“I can’t imagine the ad rates will ever go down,” said Walter Guarino, an advertising professor at Seton Hall University. “The ads are a fall-back, a fail-safe to keep up the entertainment value going if the game is a bomb. They’ve now taken front and center stage.”

What’s more, the networks are milking more and more ad money from the Super Bowl by showing even more commercials. According to TNS, there was over 47 minutes of commercials (including house ads for ABC programs) on last year’s telecast, up from 37 minutes just five years ago.

But you probably won’t hear Super Bowl-watchers complain. The game is arguably now more about the ads than the action on the gridiron.

Michael Pavone, president of Pavone, a brand consulting firm in Harrisburg, Pa. that runs Spotbowl, a Web site where viewers can vote for their favorite commercials, said Apple’s (Charts) famous “1984″ ad for the Macintosh changed everything.

It raised the bar for how lavish a Super Bowl ad could be and since then hype about the ads has been so intense that the discussion of the commercials leading up to the game often overshadows the game itself.

“People anticipate the Super Bowl commercials like they do movie premiers,” said Steve McKee, president of McKee Wallwork Cleveland Advertising, an agency that runs Adbowl, another site that tracks opinions about Super Bowl commercials.

To that end, Pavone cited a 2005 survey by consulting firm Penn, Schoen and Berland that showed just how much interest there is in the game compared to the commercials. According to the survey, 58 percent of respondents said they’d rather miss some of the game than any of the ads.

What’s more, 58 percent also said they talk about the commercials at work on Monday compared to just 47 percent who talk about the game.

And people don’t just have interest in this year’s commercials. There is a sense of nostalgia for “classic” Super Bowl ads. Go to YouTube, the popular video site owned by Google (Charts), and you’ll find that several users have posted the Apple 1984 commercial and that those posts have been viewed by more than 200,000 people in the past year.

CBS is even running a prime-time special on Friday called “Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials” which will showcase ads such as the Apple spot, the Michael Jordan versus Larry Bird “Nothing but net” commercial for McDonald’s (Charts) in 1993 and EDS’ “Cat herder” spot from 2000.

Viewers will have a chance to vote for their favorite to see if it could dethrone Coca-Cola’s (Charts) 1980 Mean Joe Greene ad as the most popular Super Bowl commercial ever.

The network aired a similar show last year (even though it wasn’t broadcasting the game) that was watched by more than 9 million viewers. The program’s executive producer said that even though there isn’t much new in this year’s show, there is still heavy interest in it.

“The success of our show is pretty amazing in that you are not dealing with a lot of new material. By and large, it’s the same commercials. But you want to see them again. It’s like reliving those great TV moments and people don’t mind seeing them year-in and year-out,” said Bob Horowitz, executive producer for “Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials.”

Still, the question begs to be asked. Do Super Bowl commercials really work?

It’s one thing to be able to vividly remember last year’s popular spot from Anheuser-Busch (Charts) featuring a lamb streaking during one of the Clydesdale horses’ football games or even the famous 1973 Joe Namath-Farrah Fawcett Noxzema shaving cream ad. But do the commercials actually make you more likely to drink Bud and shave with Noxzema?

One marketing executive says too many Super Bowl advertisers these days think more about making people laugh instead of making people want to buy your product.

“An ad can be entertaining with sophomoric humor as long as it gives you an idea of what the commercial is selling,” said Spyro Kourtis, president of the Hacker Group, an ad agency in Bellevue, Wash. “A million viewers are not as valuable in my mind as 100,000 customers and that’s the perspective that more advertisers should have.”

But even if there is a debate about how effective a Super Bowl ad really is, there is no question that without the commercials, Sunday’s game would lose a lot of its allure to the many people who are only familiar with Peyton Manning because they’ve seen him in a commercial.

“There are no shows on network TV that if you took the commercials out, the ratings would go down,” said Horowitz. “It’s the opposite with the Super Bowl. Here, if you took the commercials away, you’d probably lose 25 percent of the audience.”

via money.cnn.com

Are ads superior to game?

Peter Hartlaub

“The Super Bowl ads are better than the game.”

No doubt you’ve heard at least one friend or relative make that statement, usually after a few drinks, a large gambling loss or a horrible set of Super Bowl events that mock the sports gods — such as Washington quarterback Mark Rypien being named MVP.

But have we really reached the point where commercials have become more entertaining than the sporting event that surrounds them?

Football purists will say they hate the ads, but they still seem to talk about them as much as the game itself. A good Super Bowl might get lost in your memory, but a good Super Bowl ad will be embedded in your brain for years to come. Chances are you remember every line and camera angle from Coke’s famous “Mean Joe Greene” commercial from 1979. But can you name the two teams that played the same year?

The rise in publicity for Super Bowl ads, big halftime shows and other off-field stunts are no accident. Although the Nielsen ratings for the Super Bowl have fallen over the decades, the game-watching demographic has widened to include more women and men who don’t like the sport.

“Originally it was just a football game, and guys who liked football were the ones who watched it,” says Don Bruzzone of Alameda’s Bruzzone Research Co., which has been measuring the effectiveness of Super Bowl commercials since 1992. “And then all of a sudden it grew into an extravaganza that would appeal to almost everybody.”

Super Bowl advertisements will cost about $2.6 million for a 30-second spot this year. (They cost a “mere” $324,000 when the San Francisco 49ers beat the Cincinnati Bengals in 1982.)

Bruzzone’s Paul Shellenberg says in terms of who’s advertising, 2007 is looking a lot like 2006 — with regulars such as Budweiser and Pepsi returning with several spots. As of Monday afternoon, there were fewer movie spots scheduled than usual, although Shellenberg said the studios often wait until the last minute.

The ads are a huge gamble for advertisers. Bruzzone’s research shows that a successful commercial gives a buyer eight times the impact of an ad that doesn’t resonate.

The price for an ad has become a punch line, which has even been used in the commercials themselves. When all the figures are added up, though, Bruzzone says research shows that advertisers aren’t throwing away their money.

“There are a lot of intelligent people making decisions about this sort of thing,” Bruzzone says. “They’re priced at just about what they’re worth.”

Bruzzone doesn’t keep track of which are “good years” and “bad years” for Super Bowl advertisers. Fortunately, we do. What surrounds this article is a sincere and enthusiastic — while not especially objective — attempt to determine whether the ads are, in fact, more entertaining than the game.

My methodology was simple, if not scientific: I’ve already watched every game for the past 10 years, and I spent several afternoons last week watching Super Bowl ads archived on YouTube and the very helpful Superbowl-ads.com Web site.

You can decide whether it’s worth your time to add up my winners and losers to find out who’s ahead — but I will reveal that it’s close. Look for a Monday morning SFGate.com Culture Blog entry that determines whether Sunday’s Super Bowl commercials were better than the game.

SUPER BOWL GAMES VS. COMMERCIALS

XXXI (1997)

The game: Green Bay 35, New England 21

The ads: Fred Astaire dances with a Dirt Devil vacuum and Holiday Inn promotes their renovations by joking about a guy who has undergone a sex change.

Final score: Neither side wanted to win. The game was predictably one-sided — Brett Favre (left) and the Packers were favored by 14 points and won by 14 points — but the ads were worse, including a digitally enhanced Astaire corpse and Holiday Inn’s big “screw you” to the gay, lesbian and transgender community. Football 9, commercials 2

The ads: Louie the Lizard tries killing off the Budweiser frogs, while a guy eating a lot of Tabasco spells doom for a mosquito that tries to suck his blood.

Final score: Terrell Davis running over the heavily favored Packers was cool, as was the sight of John Elway receiving his first Super Bowl ring. But it’s hard to beat an exploding bug. Commercials 31, football 24

The ads: The Monster.com “When I Grow Up” ads spoof corporate culture, Budweiser has a firehouse dalmatian puppy spot and Victoria’s Secret’s sexy ad proves that horny men are still the primary Super Bowl demographic.

Final score: Not sure what was more annoying — Just for Feet’s semi-racist ad that appeared to feature white guys tranquilizing a black runner from Kenya or the Atlanta Falcons’ stupid “dirty bird” dance. The ads gain the edge when Falcons safety Eugene Robinson gets arrested for solicitation of prostitution the night before the game. Commercials 14, football 10

The ads: E-Trade unveils its classic dancing monkey/”We just wasted 2 million bucks” commercial and EDS features its memorable spot about cat herders.

Final score: This is why TiVo was invented. The 2000 Super Bowl and commercial-fest were both so entertaining that there was literally no time to urinate. With arguably the most entertaining Super Bowl of all time and the best commercials falling on the same year, there can be no losers. Commercials 42, football 42 (tie)

The ads: Cedric the Entertainer shills for Budweiser, Bob Dole shills for Pepsi and EDS features the “running of the squirrels.”

Final score: Not a great year for commercials — does anyone even know what EDS sells? But the ads were still way better than this defense-oriented game, which featured the coma-inducing combination of Trent Dilfer and Kerry Collins as starting quarterbacks. Commercials 15, football 6

The ads: Charles Schwab features Barry Bonds, the Coen brothers direct an H&R Block commercial and several ads feature 9/11 tributes.

Final score: The post-9/11 commercials were classy, but became repetitive — and in retrospect, the Barry Bonds/Hank Aaron home run goof looks like something that should be turned over to the grand jury. The football game was a lot better, with Adam Vinatieri (above) kicking a last-minute field goal to seal the win. Football 28, commercials 17

The ads: Reebok’s Terry Tate: Office Linebacker, the “Cast Away” movie spoof and a Clydesdale football instant replay commercial all generate big laughs.

Final score: The only thing uglier than Budweiser’s crude “Upside Down Clown” ad was the Raiders’ game plan, which gave up 34 unanswered points to former Oakland coach Jon Gruden’s Buccaneers. The refs almost had to invoke the mercy rule in this contest. Commercials 72, football 0

The ads: A Sierra Mist commercial featuring a bagpiper getting cold air blown up his kilt looks like a Jane Austen film next to Budweiser’s flatulent horse. The 78 other ads seem to be focused on erectile dysfunction.

Final score: Everything went right during the game — a great contest between the Panthers and Patriots — and everything went wrong between plays. Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” (above) highlighted the crude and unoriginal commercials, which led to audience outrage and FCC action. Football 41, commercials minus 212

The ads: Diddy arrives at the red carpet in a Pepsi truck, Budweiser introduces a trash-talking cockatiel, and Ameriquest has a couple of decent-but-forgettable mistaken-identity ads.

Final score: Even though we didn’t have to see Mickey Rooney’s bare bottom (it was banned by the fun police), this was definitely a rebuilding year for the ad industry. Meanwhile, Tom Brady, linebacker Mike Vrabel (left) and the Patriots held off the Eagles and Terrell Owens, who stopped acting crazy for a few hours and added some drama by playing hurt. Football 35, commercials 3

The ads: A caveman gets chided for not using FedEx (it hasn’t been invented yet), Jim Henson’s Muppets are everywhere and the “magic fridge” gets Budweiser back on track.

Final score: The Seahawks didn’t come to play and neither did many of the advertisers, but at least we got to see a prehistoric dude get stomped on by a brontosaurus. Commercials 10, football 9