Forget Janet Jackson and her ripped-away bustier, forget the game, even if it brought CBS great ratings. What matters most about Super Bowl, or used to before all this brouhaha, is the ads and what people think of them.
   If one tradition remains intact about Super Bowl, it is the polling of the public about which ads most caught their attention, and this year there were three polls of note, one by USA Today, one by AdBowl.com and a third by The Wall Street Journal.
   As expected, Anheuser-Busch topped the list of favorite ads, though rankings of particular spots varied among the polls.
    According to USA Today, Bud Light’s “Dog Fetch” spot was the most popular, with a 9.04 average rating on a scale of 1 to 10. The commercial featured two dog owners showing off their pet’s skills at beer retrieval.
   The USA Today ad poll was based on the responses of 136 adults in Tampa who used a mechanism to track their second-by-second response to the ads.
  Budweiser’s “Donkey Dream,” in which a donkey ponders life with the Clydesdales, and Bud Light’s “Sleigh Ride,” featuring the un-romantic objections of a horse during a carriage ride, also made the top five with 8.83 and 8.62 points. 
   Pepsi’s “Bears” earned an 8.88 for second place with a depiction of bears going to great lengths to find soda, and Lay’s “Dentures” spot rounded out the top five with a score of 8.5 for a couple of senior citizens fighting over a bag of chips.
    In The Wall Street Journal poll, which has 3,386 responses as of this morning, two Bud ads led the list, the donkey and referee spots. No. 3 was a Chevy spot. (See charts, below) 
    AdBowl.com, which received more than 30,000 votes for ads on Sunday, also included three Budweiser ads in the top five. Among these respondents, “Donkey Dream” was the high scorer with a 3.9060 on a scale of 1 to 5. “Dog Fetch” was second with 3.9054 and Bud Light’s “Sleigh Ride” received a 3.8072 for third place.
   Lay’s “Dentures” and Chevy’s “Soap” drew a 3.5911 and a 3.5242 for fourth and fifth place. “Soap” features children moved to curse after seeing the new GM pick-up.
  AdBowl.com also categorized votes by demographic, including male and female respondents and variations by age and political affiliation. 
   Still, most of the top picks remained the same with most groups selecting Budweiser as their favorites. The only demographic that varied was kids under 18, whose favorite spot was from the Office of National Drug Control Policy, a spot that ranked eighth overall.
   Among the worst-rated ads were Levitra and Cialis, the two erectile dysfunction ads that Media Life readers voted last week as the least anticipated spots. Both spots ranked in the bottom five for both USA Today pollsters and AdBowl.com respondents.
   Among the trends for the spots this year were humor – or attempts at it – the use of animals, and the use of B-list celebrities.
   Vincent Thome, interactive developer for McKee Wallwork Henderson, the advertising agency that created and manages AdBowl.com, says humor is vital for the group dynamic of Super Bowl viewers.
   “Advertisers recognize that people are watching in a group setting. A tear-jerker isn’t something you’d want in a group environment. You want the energy for a group of people to burst our laughing to make it more memorable.”
   As for the use of animals, Thome says they are often non-controversial way to generate laughs among a broad audience.
    “Animals hold a neutral space,” he says. “No matter who you are or what you find funny, animals always hit home.”
   As for the celebrities, the most popular spots didn’t feature any recognizable faces. Jessica Simpson, the latest MTV icon and the star of Sunday’s Pizza Hut spot, found her match in a commercial featuring the Muppets.
   "Even though Jessica Simpson has celebrity status, she’s low hanging fruit, not like the Pepsi-Britney Spears combination,” says Thome.