What a night and what a great beginning for AdJab. Our team made their picks for the winners in many categories and here they are:

Funniest Ad
Both Ameriquest ads, the tazer one and the one with the guy murdering the cat.
Runner up: The FedEx ad with Burt Reynolds and the commercial with Cindy Crawford and Carson Kressley both lusting after a guy who was drinking a Diet Pepsi.

Sexiest Ad
The Tabasco bikini ad.
Runner up: Watching the Tabasco ad a second time on TiVo. Sorry, GoDaddy.

Best Animal Ad
The Camry ad with the talking dog and the $199/month "leash". People liked it more than the other animal ads, but there wasn't a lot of competition for this one.
Runner up: The cockatoo defending the woman at the bar by Bud Light.

Best Use of Fictional Characters
Mastercard's "priceless" spokescharacters having dinner with Mr. Clean doing the dishes.

Worst Use of Fictional Characters
Marvel comics characters special effects are wasted in a Visa check card ad. Mastercard trumps Visa.

Biggest Waste of Money
McDonald's "Lincoln Fry," although the second spot was funnier. This wasn't the worst overall ad, but we expect more from McDonald's.
Runner up: CareerBuilder.com. The forgettable monkey ads weren't impressive. Anyone could have come up with them.

Most Forgettable
The one by those counter top people. We didn't know who they were before the Super Bowl and we still don't know who they are afterwards. I copied their name and it was gone before I could paste it in here. Thank you though for putting Dennis Rodman in a bathtub.

Worst Overall Ad
The Ford truck ad that shows their trucks in a parking lot are tougher than a gang of bikers that intimidated a family that was driving on a highway. What?
Runner up: This was the closest one: MBNA having Gladys Knight play rugby. It was like they signed a contract for the slot, then realized a few days ago that the Super Bowl was this weekend.

Best Celebrity in an Ad
Brad Pitt going out for a six pack of Heineken. It had an unearthly feel, like it was too cool to compete against funny Super Bowl ads. It was like watching Blade Runner. Very serious.
Runner up: Burt Reynolds in the FedEx ad. Although it seems like it could have been any celebrity, Burt did his part well.

Best First Half Ad
The FedEx/Kinkos ad where Burt Reynolds gets a groin kick from a bear. It made fun of Super Bowl ads and came off as really clever.
Runner up: The Bud Light airplane jump.

Best Second Half Ad
The Ameriquest ad where it looks like the guy is murdering his cat. Even people who hated Ameriquest's tazer ad loved this one.
Runner up: The hot Tabasco ad.

Best Overall Ad
Both Ameriquest ads, the robbery/tazer and the cat murder. Unlike the Oscars, comedies can win the top prize here.

This Verizon ad might not have been new for the Super Bowl (or maybe it was), but it was decent. I liked that the crazy mailroom guy from Just Shoot Me appearing on television again, this time with a beard. A guy with a bad cell phone can't hear the caller from the pet store telling him that there was an error and the snake he took home was a poisonous cotton mouth. It tries to bite him and he thinks it's just being playful. Nice!

I liked the earlier Verizon ad too, with the monkeys walking around saying (in monkey), "Can you hear me now?" into their banana phones. I thought that one might have been funnier coming from Verizon's competition though...

This ad was a little disturbing. Maybe. Maybe not to you, but I am not filing this one under sexy. Cialis shows a bunch of older couples and the point is that their drug is helping the people you're looking at have a healthy sex life.

Hmm...not exactly the Tabasco commercial, but who are we to judge. No screen captures on this one. Sorry.

Olympus throws some groove at us and shows us that funkifying family vacation or birthday party photos is as easy as dancing to ourselves and pausing a moment before snapping a photo with their new hybrid camera and media player.

There's just something about the people dancing that looked a little too computer generated, however maybe it's the music and the big blue room that gives it a little edge.

Finally, they didn't show the product name;  just the hip web address. But, we've already had that discussion.

In Subway's ad, a cop pulls up to a parked car at night time and approaches with a flash light to check on the couple that's making out in it. You know it's not going to be a couple making out when they roll down the window for him and he shines his flashlight in.

It turns out to be two guys eating Subway subs and they're listening to Chicago or Peter Cetera or maybe both. It's an awkward moment that just isn't awkward enough to be memorable.

So maybe this is a theme. We have a guy who looks like he's killing a cat in an Ameriquest commercial and in this one a dad is telling his daughter that if he shares his Emerald Nuts with her, all unicorns will disappear forever. So would Santa and the Easter Bunny would get whacked.

The Easter Bunny seemed strange looking, but I've never seen the Easter Bunny, so maybe it was a dead-on impersonation. This is definitely a step up from their commercials where they talk about all these strange things that have EN for initials, but not a great Super Bowl commercial.

This one was just as funny as the Ameriquest one where the shopkeeper thinks a guy is going to rob him and attacks him. The difference is that people who thought the first one was in poor taste, thought this one was laugh-out-loud funny, even if you could see it coming with the tomato sauce spilling on the floor.

Again, the "don't judge too quickly" theme didn't stick in my head and I just might have to hold the halftime show against them, since they sponsored it. It wasn't terrible, it was just, oh who am I kidding? I'm using TiVo and I fast forwarded throught the entire thing. It might have been a life-changing set of Paul McCartney songs. I'll never know. I am so far behind everyone else...

The first commercial didn't thrill many people. One person commenting liked the monkeys. Hmm...

The second one has them all in a conference room and they make the one human sit on a chair with a whoopee cushion. Fart noises. Neat. It's actually a little funny. Then one of the monkeys (which I still think are being played by real-life chimps who are only pretending to be monkeys) jumps up and down on his own whoopie cushion. Two more fart noises. Awesome.

I liked that the meeting room was loaded with bananas and that all of the chairs were really too low for the human to sit in.

Tabsaco gets my vote for hotttest commercial, no pun intended. It makes the GoDaddy commercial look tame. Burn baby burn.

A woman is sunbathing in a two-piece Tabasco bikini. She pours Tabasco into her shrimp dip. She pulls her bikini top away from her skin and you see that she is more sunburned under her Tabasco bikini top than where the sun was hitting her directly.

I had to watch this one twice to catch that sunburn thing. And I just might have to watch that one again.

I was looking forward to seeing what CareerBuilder.com was going to do at the Super Bowl. First, I used to be a partner in an online career center (I was the tech guy who built it, go figure). Second, Monster isn't advertising this year, so you'd think CareerBuilder.com would step up with something special.

Nope. The company name on the wall is clever ("Yeknom Industries"), but the point the guy makes about working with monkeys isn't really a surprise. The monkey photocopying is butt was cute, but weren't they all chimps not monkeys?

Monster's "When I grow up, I want to file all day" was an advertising classic. If you can't top that (and who could?), then why waste the $2M. Just buy banner ads on Yahoo. Oh wait, they own Hot Jobs.

No one I talked to liked this, not even the second one they ran.

Holy crap. They read my mind! Maybe they were reading AdJab?

The second Pepsi iTunes commercial used Gwen Stefani and only Gwen. This is exactly what I was asking for.

We have got to do an award for best mind reading. I mean, I'm still going to drink Diet Coke...

Brad Pitt's foray into the Super Bowl commercials on behalf of Heineken turned out to be pretty good. While out picking up a fresh six pack of his favorite brew, he has to avoid the throngs of screaming fans chasing him around town (looked a little too much like a 'Living Dead' flick for me).  He sneaks out the back door of the convenience store, and causes the lone paparazzi outside of his building to toss his camera in the air when he comes up from the opposite direction.  Fun spot, and Pitt does a great job of just doing his thing.

A woman opens up her Pepsi and plays Gwen Stefani's If I Were A Rich Girl. Two guys on a stoop flip the lids open and closed like DJs at a turntable and the music scratches and starts and stops. A nerdy kid open his Pespi in front of his girlfriend and it plays "I like your mom! I like your mom!" A band plays along with a Pepsi bottle until they bump into it and it starts skipping.

"Your song is in the bottle. 200 million songs. 1 in 3 wins."

Worked for me. It might have gotten an award if they had just kept playing the Gwen Stefani song. iTease.

Pretty much a standard movie ad, as in no narrative to report on, but one of the most anticipated summer movies in years. Christian Bale has turned in consistently excellet work in underrated or under-seen films for ages. Basically 30 seconds of action put together from the teaser and trailer, there are shots of Michael Caine as Alfred and Morgan Freeman, but none of Katie Holmes (Rowrrrrrrr) as the love interest or Liam Neeson who apparently re-does Qui-Gon Jinn as Bruce Wayne's trainer. (He's in the full trailer on the official Warner Bros. site.)

Still, I had to tell the imaginary friends watching the game with me to shut up so I could hear it.

McDonald's first foray into the Super Bowl spots was pretty sad, considering their history.  Heck, pulling out the old Larry Bird / Michael Jordan "Nothing But Net" ads would have scored higher than some guy realizing that his french fry looks like Abe Lincoln.  Then again, the premise of women wanting to go home with you to see the Lincoln fry is kind of daring for the fast food shop.

Nice little tie in with Yahoo! Auctions, though.