The five biggest Super Bowl moments outscored the five biggest ads Sunday, when measured by audience spikes and how many folks using TiVo rewound the action to watch it again.
TiVo said Monday that the top moment of Super Bowl XLIV was Tracy Porter’s fourth-quarter interception of Peyton Manning that was returned for a touchdown.
The next four biggest moments of the game were a failed would-be touchdown pass by the Indianapolis Colts, a New Orleans Saints penalty that moved the Colts half the distance to the goal line, a dropped pass by Reggie Wayne of the Colts and Saints coach Sean Peyton’s postgame Gatorade drenching.
In aggregate, those “game” moments were more popular than the top five commercials.
“House Rules” from Doritos was tops in the ad category. The spot has a little boy telling his mother’s date to keep his hands off her, and off his Doritos.
Snickers’ “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry,” with Betty White getting tackled, was second, followed by the controversial Focus on the Family ad starring Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Tim Tebow tackling his mom.
Halftime with the Who seemed to be a hit; it didn’t quite measure up to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band last year but was close.
TiVo used a different method this year to calculate the Super Bowl’s “most engaging” game moments and commercials, determined by looking at viewership bumps relative to the surrounding 15 minutes of programming. That way, commercials in the fourth quarter have no advantage over those in the third, for example, even if more viewers were tuned in for the fourth quarter.
TiVo did not include the short promo that featured David Letterman, Jay Leno and Oprah Winfrey in its commercials category, but if it had, it would have been No. 2.
No movie commercials came close to cracking the top 10. In fact, all were outperformed by an ad for a video game: “Dante’s Inferno” from Electronic Arts.
The two highest-scoring movies were from Universal: “Robin Hood” and “The Wolfman.” Those were followed by Disney’s “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” Paramount’s “Shutter Island” and Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland.”
“Alice,” though, scored better in a poll from MovieTickets.com, which determined that it was the “most memorable” movie commercial to air during the game, with 81% of 550 people polled remembering that they saw the ad.
The MovieTickets.com poll ranked the other six movie ads as “Robin Hood,” “Shutter Island,” “The Wolfman,” “Prince of Persia,” “The Last Airbender” and “The Back-up Plan.”
