The company’s Doritos ad, airing in the first quarter of Sunday’s game, is this year’s big buzz winner, placing first in several ad competitions in a year remarkable mostly for the underwhelming creative turned in by most companies.

The “Free Doritos” spot ended Anheuser-Busch’s 10-year reign atop USA Today’s much-watched Super Bowl ad poll, placing first. It also won Michigan State University’s survey and placed first in digital marketing company Zeta Interactive's poll measuring online buzz.

Perhaps most significantly, “Free Doritos” became the first non-agency spot ever to win top honors in the USA Today poll. The user-generated ad, conceived by two brothers in Indiana and voted into the game by visitors to Doritos.com, could signal a major shift for future games.

“What it means is that the creative folks at big ad agencies don't own all the great ideas in the world,” says Robert Kolt, an instructor in MSU's advertising, public relations and retailing department who helped grade the ads.

“I think the Doritos ads proved that if you ask for input and listen to other people, fans might have great ideas that many folks would enjoy and help sell more products.”

The spot was set in an office and showed a man consulting a snow globe that he dubbed a crystal ball. After claiming that the crystal forecast free Doritos that day, the man turned and hurled it at a vending machine behind him, breaking the glass and freeing the selection of Doritos bags to passersby.

At the end of the ad, a colleague picked up the “crystal ball” and asked it if he was getting a raise, then threw it behind him like the first man. It caught his unsuspecting boss in the groin, prompting his co-worker to predict a “no” on the question.

A few years ago, UCG ads were all the rage in the game, with several companies asking Super Bowl viewers to come up with their own spots. But they received lukewarm receptions, and many wrote off the idea as simply a fad.

Doritos, however, stuck with the concept and allowed consumers to vote on which of five finalists would appear in this year’s game, promising winners $1 million. The company’s other user-generated spot, “Power of the Crunch,” in which good things happen to a guy crunching the chips, also did well in the major ad polls, ranking second in MSU’s and earning a “best-of” rating from CoreBrands chief executive officer James Gregory.

“The Doritos spots were successful because they illustrated how people could react, or what might happen, if people acted the way they want to,” Kolt says. “The ads were fantasy, fun and funny brought to life.”

While Doritos was the night’s big winner, there were a number of losers whose ads received much lower marks. That included foreign car brands, which made a big push in the Super Bowl with multiple ads, as American automotive brands pulled back after getting a government bailout.

Two spots for Hyundai were among the four least-liked in the USA Today poll, and Toyota’s Venza ad ranked dead last in the rankings for Spotbowl, an annual ranking compiled by Harrisburg, Pa.-based Pavone.

GoDaddy’s shtick also seems to be wearing thin. Its two ads featuring scantily clad women, which directed viewers online to see what it dubbed the too-hot-for-broadcast endings, ranked among the 10 least-popular with USA Today and Spotbowl.