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As I prepared to watch the 2008 game, I wondered what the principals at Portland’s acclaimed Wieden+Kennedy agency thought of all this hoopla over a simple poll. If at the end of the day the people who brought us, among many others, the classic “Just Do It!” Nike campaign think that the opinions of 238 people in a controlled environment really matter.

I wondered because at that very moment Wieden creatives were finishing up postproduction on the latest round of CareerBuilder’s Super Bowl ads, not to mention a new spot for Coca-Cola.

Charlie Brown and the Giants Pull Upsets for the Ages

Going into Super Bowl XLII, the Giants had about as good a chance of defeating the undefeated New England Patriots as Charlie Brown had of winning at, well, anything. Yet by game’s end both underdogs had won.

The Giants had sent the Pats’ QB Tom Brady and their head coach, Bill Belichick, back to the drawing board for perfection, and Charlie Brown—thanks to a simple, playful, visually brilliant piece of branding magic for Coke created by Wieden+Kennedy—literally rose high above the competition in the year’s clash of ad titans.

The sixty-second Coke spot chronicled an aerial battle royal at a Thanksgiving Day Parade between cartoon-character balloons over a giant inflatable bottle of Coke. At first the war is between the precocious demon-child Stewie of Fox’s Family Guy and the animated 1960s icon Underdog. The commercial had me transfixed, a clash between goofy 1960s values and contemporary postmodern snark played out on a grand scale, high above and sometimes smashing into the skyscrapers of Manhattan. When the Charlie Brown balloon finally swoops in out of nowhere and claims the Coke bottle (not long before David Tyree snatched Eli Manning’s miracle fourth-quarter pass out of the air), the spot ratcheted up several notches in my eyes, from memorable to the hallowed level of former Coke classics “Hilltop” and “Happiness Factory.”

Why? Perhaps it’s because by this stage of the game I had grown tired of and a little embarrassed for the men in the many formulaic sitcom-ish skits making asses of themselves for the tenth year in a row in order to sneak—oh my goodness!—a bottle of beer! Or maybe it was because I was still disturbed by the image of the hideous woman rubbing, um, nuts—a.k.a. the supposedly tasty product—on her person on behalf of the good yet misguided folks at Planters. Or maybe it was the fact that this year’s game featured derivative, contrived ads featuring geckos and cavemen, but not for the brand that put them on the cultural map, Geico. (Note to creative directors and chief marketing officers: Cavemen, lizards, frogs, and Clydesdales have sort of already been claimed. Please e-mail me for a complete list of available critters.)

Budweiser’s Clydesdale “Rocky” commercial was charming and on brand, but its funniest spot of the game was Will Ferrell in character from his forthcoming Semi-Pro movie, extolling the benefits of Bud Light, riffing lines such as “Bud Light: it refreshes the palate, and the loins.”

Strange how the best beer spot of the game was one that made fun of beer spots.

The rest was pretty standard, lavishly produced, pushing the bounds of tasteless Super Bowl fare. Sure, there were laughs to be had—FedEx’s “Giant Pigeons” and Tide’s “Talking Stain” were solidly entertaining—but nothing broke new ground or made much of an impression on me.

Yet if this is the case, how can I explain my reaction to a commercial that was based on the clamping of jumper cables onto a young man’s nipples? How can I explain the fact that I laughed when I saw this disturbingly shocking ad for yet another wonder drink, AMP? And it wasn’t just me. The people watching the game with me that night—aged ten to seventy-two—laughed, too, even though the spot featured all the things that we claim to despise in TV ads. It was crude, gratuitously unsettling, and semi-disgusting, which, one would think, were not on the brief for something that supposedly tastes good. But it happened. When the cables