Best Super Bowl Commercial

One night a year, Americans watch the advertising on purpose and complain when it is not good enough. No other market has anything like it.

The economics are strange enough to explain the work. A thirty-second slot costs more than most short films, which means the only rational strategy is to make something people will discuss the following morning.

That pressure produced Ridley Scott directing a dystopian science fiction film for a computer company in 1984, a board that reportedly tried to kill it, and an ad that ran essentially once. It also produced talking frogs, a stain with opinions, and one word that an entire country adopted for two solid years.

The full field is thirty-six commercials, from the ones that are genuinely great pieces of filmmaking to the ones that are simply unforgettable.

The bracket is a good test of whether an advertisement can be judged apart from what it was selling. Most of these campaigns are long dead and several of the companies are too, which leaves nothing to vote for except the sixty seconds itself.