Super Bowl Ads: Score One for the Doritos Baby

Score one for the bodacious baby. The Super Bowl was lost when quarterback Tom Brady flung a football halfway across the field -- that went uncaught. But the competition for the Super Bowl's best commercial was won by an ad about a crafty grandma who slung a sling-wearing baby across the yard -- to snatch a bag of Doritos.

This marks the first time that consumers -- not preselected panelists rating the ads during the game -- picked the winner in the USA TODAY/Facebook Super Bowl Ad Meter. Online voting, which began after each ad aired in Sunday night's broadcast, ended at 6 p.m. ET Tuesday. Consumers picked from 55 commercials on which advertisers spent up to a record $3.5 million for each 30-second slot.

But for the Super Bowl's 38 national advertisers, this was also the Social Bowl. Never mind that they spent upwards of $230 million on just the TV advertising time. The purpose of most of the spots was to drive consumers to share the spots with friends, buzz about them and the brand and then try to find out more about the product.

Placing a close second in Ad Meter was Anheuser-Busch's beer-fetching dog, Weego. Two carmakers tied for third: Kia, whose ad featured a guy with ultraracy dreams that include supermodel Adriana Lima; and Chrysler, which turned actor Clint Eastwood into almost as big a Super Bowl presence as New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning.

The gutsy carmaker featured Eastwood in a two-minute "Halftime in America" spot that likened the nation's current plight to a football team revising its game plans at halftime. The spot was initially not included in Ad Meter because it aired at halftime, when fewer viewers are typically watching. But it was later added because of strong social-media sentiment.

Despite jeers from some Republican politicians that...