Practice your SuperBowl ad-rating skills: Round 1

In a few short weeks, the SuperBowl will be here with its inevitable parties at which the sponsors' commercials garner as much involvement as the game. Eschewing the popularity-poll mentality surrounding other rankings of the $4-million-a-minute commercials, we again offer our Job#1 Effectiveness Rating System...

Ranking commercials based on how funny they are is a parlor game. If you're advertising an automobile, why should you care whether some beer commercial is funnier than yours? And no matter how funny, shouldn't your commercial cause folks to think better of your brand? To increase the likelihood people will choose it? Commercials are supposed to sell, and to do that they must engage the audience and cause the brand to be seen as somehow special and distinctive.

A short quiz

So, to help you hone your commercial-effectiveness-rating skills, here are three commercials from past SuperBowls. All were judged among the best by the popularity polls at the time. But are they all effective? If you can't answer "yes" to at least two of those three Job#1 questions above, then the commercial doesn't make our list.

The scoring

Using the three-question Job#1 system, we judge one of the commercials to be effective, the other two not so much. Here's how we score 'em:

See you on game day.