Doritos, Google Headline Super Bowl Ad Winners

We created own own ranking of the best and worst Super Bowl ads from technology companies, at left:

The most popular ad? One from Doritos in which a chip-obsessed gym patron throws down with a pair of guys who stole his Nacho Cheese package, according to a Business Journal survey.

That ad was also "the most watched TV ad of all time," according to Nielsen, which estimated that 116.2 million viewers tuned into the 30-second tale of "Tim," the revenge-minded Doritos nut who's decked out in a samurai suit made of Nacho Cheese chips. Ads from Snickers, E-Trade and Budweiser trailed the Doritos ad's popularity in the Business Journal poll.

More close to home, Google's third-quarter "Parisian Love" ad was probably the most talked about Super Bowl spot from a technology company. That's partly because Google only rarely does any television advertising and partly because the ad's wholesome narrative is cleverly told through a series of queries on Google's search engine, rather than going in for the slapstick and sex that populates most Super Bowl adverts.

"Parisian Love" ranked as high as No. 2 in popularity, according to some Monday morning analysis from media firms and advertising agencies. On the other hand, the 30-second spot's "watchability" came in at just No. 43 out of the 63 Super Bowl ads, per the real-time reactions of a sample viewing group put together by USA Today.

Advertising Age's Michael Learmonth does a good job of rounding up the wildly divergent reactions to "Parisian Love" here.

Meanwhile, it's no surprise that a lot of Super Bowl spots pushed the envelope of taste in the name of humor and impact. But were this year's ads collectively more offensive than in previous years? Amanda Hess of the Washington City Paper calls out the ads she thinks were the biggest offenders in terms of sexism, racism and homophobia here.

And if this year's lineup of ads did in fact favor a crueler, more misogynistic brand of story-telling than usual, Slate's Dayo Olopade theorizes that historic unemployment rates among men aged 25 to 54 may explain why. Humor, the theory goes, gets a lot meaner when times are rough, and Madison Avenue is simply following the zeitgeist.