Doritos 'House Rules' Super Bowl Commercial (Youtube screenshot)

Two Doritos Super Bowl commercials consistently rank in the top five across the board when fans are asked which ads from the game they liked the best. The Doritos “House Rules” commercial is an often named top favorite, with the brand’s “Underdog” commercial placing high as well. Both commercials were created by consumers competing for a ‘Crash the Super Bowl’ contest by Frito-Lay.

“House Rules” creator Joelle De Jesus won $25,000 for his homemade commercial, while “Underdog” creator Joshua Svoboda won a whopping $600,000 for his ad, which placed second in the annual USA Today Ad Meter survey. The Snickers Betty White Super Bowl commercial took the top spot in that ranking.

Besides user-created videos like the Doritos commercials, internally created advertisements were also heavy hitters during this year’s Super Bowl. Google’s self-created ‘love story in Paris’ commercial generated huge buzz and was rated highly by fans and advertising reviewers.

So what does this mean for the big advertising and marketing firms out there hoping to land mega-bucks to produce commercials for big brands? Maybe they need to tighten their belts and get in touch with their inner consumers. Successful advertising is no longer about pushing a brand down people’s throats with flashy production values and celebrity voice-overs. The Super Bowl commercials that dug in and connected with viewers on a personal level were the ones that most won over fans.

We’re betting next year we’ll be seeing more user-generated Super Bowl commercial contests and more in-house ads produced by companies wanting to garner that personal touch with their consumers. When anyone with a smart idea and a camera can make a winning Super Bowl commercial, it’s more than obvious the massive advertising agencies out there are going to have to change things up big time to stay competitive.

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Betty White in Snickers ad

Overall, we here at SnarkFood judged this year’s 2010 Super Bowl commercials as rather mediocre overall. None of the ads really slammed us with that ‘wow’ factor we’ve gotten from some previous Super Bowl advertisements. There were, however, a few that did tickle our funny bone or at least make us smile.

One of our top favorites of 2010 was the Betty White Snickers Super Bowl commercial – mostly because we just love Betty White no matter what the hell she’s doing.

Another one we were rather fond of was the so-called ‘Green Police’ super bowl commercial from Audi. Of course, we can’t help but love any commercial with a music background from Cheap Trick and lines like” “You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy!”

We wanted to love the Dave Letterman, Jay Leno and Oprah Winfrey Super Bowl commercial ad for The Late Show just because it was pretty cool to have all three of them in the spot. But honestly we felt it fell a little bit flat and could have been so much more…

Budweiser purchased so much ad time during the Super Bowl that we were entirely sick of them by the time the Saints kicked the Colts ass into the ground. The only ad we really kind of liked was the Budweiser Lost commerical, which at least deserved props for its great production value and bravery in trying to take on a parody of such an epic hit show.

Weirdly enough, the Google Super Bowl commercial actually kind of made us feel a bit sappy, which I guess was a success. The search term story of a French romance was a creative way to promote the search engine, not that they really need the marketing.

All in all, we have to give our votes for the best Super Bowl commercials of 2010 to Snickers for the Betty White/Abe Vigoda football ad and Audi for their Green Police commercial.

As for the worst, we hands down pick the Tim Tebow ad for being so pointless it wasn’t even worth the media firestorm over it and GoDaddy.com for boring us yet again with a stupid slutty chick commercial nearly identical to every other commercial they’ve ever aired.

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