Super Bowl Scores Big, But It Doesn't Ad Up

Virtually everyone who rated the ads yesterday put Bud Light's hidden-fridge ad at the top of their list. You know, the one in which the 25-year-old guy installs a secret revolving wall to make his refrigerator disappear at the pull of a sconce so his Bud Light stock won't be depleted by unwelcome guests, only on the other side of the wall is an apartment of 18-year-old guys who take all the beer and then kneel down and worship the "magic fridge," teaching viewers that 25-year-old guys are much smarter than 18-year-old guys, or maybe the other way around.

USA Today loved it -- it topped its exclusive Super Bowl Ad Meter real-time, consumer-focus-group ranking.

Even Western Michigan University loved it. A panel of faculty and spouses from WMU's advertising and promotion program ranked the advertising on a 10-point scale based on creativity, strategy, execution and production values. (I know, sounds like a way to write off the cost of beer and pizza for a faculty Super Bowl party to me, too.)

Anyway, in a news release, the panel announced that the "Bud Light ad featuring a magic revolving wall and refrigerator took top honors as the best commercial of Super Bowl XL."

This year's biggest dud, most agreed, was the Bud ad that kicked off the game, in which a toady has hidden bottles of Bud Light around his office, causing havoc as his co-workers search for them.

"What a letdown--America waits all year for these ads, and this is how we kick things off?" asks Slate.com, pretty well summing up the consensus among the alarming number of folks who navel-gazed about the Super Bowl ads.

Yes, everybody thought the magic fridge ad was the best of this year's crop.

Everybody, that is, except Marco Iacoboni, associate professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA and director of the transcranial magnetic stimulation lab of UCLA's Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center.

Iacoboni and a bunch of pals used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the brains of "five healthy volunteers" who watched the Super Bowl ads.

They found that the ads with the Bud Light hidden in the office was one of the two best, while the magic fridge ad was one of the two biggest flops.

How can hordes of navel-gazers have gotten it so wrong?

"What is quite surprising," Iacoboni said in a news release, "is the strong disconnect that can be seen between what people say and what their brain activity seems to suggest."