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2006 Super Bowl Commercials & NFL Football Ads

The Super Bowl of advertising just happens to be advertising at the Super Bowl. The NFL football championship game is the most watched single-day sporting event and highest rated television program in America. Televised to huge audiences and with growing public awareness, sponsor placements have become the Super Bowl's main sideshow event. If you think money rolls at NFL football betting, wait until you hear the kind that rolls out from advertisers during SuperBowl season. And why not? NFL Super Bowl has a monstrous captive audience, which reached a record 144.4 million US viewers in Super Bowl 2004. In one way, this is a good thing. Advertisers try harder. Super Bowl commercials try constantly to raise the bar in creativity and market appeal because everyone knows that everyone's watching.

At Super Bowl 2004, viewers heard talk about erections, witnessed a flatulent horse, and saw a wide-eyed urchin utter the truncated but suggestive phrase "Holy sh-". Super Bowl fans cringed and tittered as two erectile-dysfunction drugs - Levitra, marketed by GlaxoSmithKline PLC and Bayer AG, and Cialis, marketed by Eli Lilly & Co. and Icos Corp. - filled the Super Bowl with oddball allusions to the malady they treat. Super Bowl 2004's top advertisers were, not surprisingly, Pepsi, Budweiser (Anheuser-Busch), and Chevrolet.

Super Bowl commercials in 2004 went for an average $2.25 to $2.3 million per 30-second spot. A bit sadly for advertisers, Janet Jackson's so-called Super Bowl 2004 "Boobgate" eclipsed the ads of the "Erectile Dysfunction Bowl". Come Monday, NFL football fans seemed more preoccupied with Janet Jackson's breast exposure than with heartwarmers like Pepsi's Hendrix and Budweiser's Donkey Clydesdale.

Sans the MTV-produced Janet Jackson halftime mayhem, Super Bowl advertising in 2003 averaged at $2.1 million for a 30-second ad. NFL football fans sat through dull ads for big bucks punctuated by some memorable hits and duds. Reebok's Office Linebacker scored as well as the Osbournes/Osmonds Pepsi ad, which capitalized on their MTV success. Dogdge hawked up the season's bug loser.

Since 1967, there have been 37 Super Bowl games with approximately 60 ad spots each, totaling more than 2,200 Super Bowl commercials to date. Many say that much of standout Super Bowl ads in the 1970s and 1980s had been classics to which Super Bowl commercials in these last two decades arguably can not seem to compare (read: the quality of Super Bowl advertising seems to be declining). Whether or not you agree, let us take a look at some of the best moments in NFL Super Bowl advertising.

All-time Best Super Bowl Commercials

Just about everybody has the same favorite Super Bowl ads. Several reputable Web sites have conducted Best Super Bowl Ads surveys among fans online, and seen similar results. Superbowl-ads.com, for instance, lists Apple, Coke, McDonald's, Noxema, Pepsi, and Xerox commercials as their all-time greatest Super Bowl ads. These Super Bowl commercials would be seen again topping the list in other such online surveys, but not exactly in the same manner. Here, we compare the results at three different big-named Web sites.

CBS.com's Best Super Bowl Ads

1 - Coke - "Mean Joe Green" (1980)
2 - Budweiser (Anheuser-Busch) - "Butt Drinker" (2003)
3 - McDonalds - "Showdown" (1993)
4 - Apple - "1984" (1984)
5 - Tabasco - "Mosquito" (1998)
6 - Pepsi - "Cindy Crawford" (1992)

ESPN.com's Best Super Bowl Ads

1 - Apple - "1984" (1984)
2 - Budweiser (Anheuser-Busch) - "Frogs" (1995)
3 - Pepsi - "Apartment 10G" (1987)
4 - Xerox - "Monks" (1977)
5 - McDonalds - "Showdown" (1993)
6 - Pepsi - "Diner" (1995)
*According to ESPN.com: The 1979 Mean Joe Green Coke commercial, which everyone agrees is a classic, did not actually debut during the Super Bowl. If it had, it would be pushing the Macintosh ad for the top spot on our list. Since it didn't, we'll have to settle for this excuse to remember the ad and get choked up all over again.

Forbes.com's Best Super Bowl Ads

1 - Subway - Jared iinspires others (2001)
2 - Columbia Pictures - A Few Good Men (1993)
3 - Columbia Pictures - Groundhog Day (1993)
4 - Budweiser (Anheuser-Busch) - (Fired)
5 - Pepsi - Coke driver sneaks a Pepsi (1996)
6 - Pepsi - Shaq versus boy (1994)