A crowd of people at Robert Kolt's Haslett home screamed "monkey" on Sunday night — twice.
It's become a tradition for the partygoers to shout the word whenever a monkey appears during the Super Bowl commercials.
Because after all, it wasn't the game that mattered — just the advertisements.
Kolt, an MSU instructor, and about 20 members of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing met to grade the Super Bowl advertisements during Sunday's game. It was the largest group in the party's nine-year history, Kolt said.
"The more people you have doing it, the more accurate it is," he said, adding that the increase this year is due to the three departments combining into one.
Of the 57 ads that earned scores, Dove's advertisement came out as No. 1 by an eight-point margin.
The ad portrays young girls and what they see as their personal flaws, to promote the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, aiming to change how women perceive beauty in themselves.
"It's hard to do anything spectacular anymore — that's what makes the Dove ad so much better," advertising Professor Nora Rifon said. "It matched the brand with the right cause. It was a perfectly constructed ad, if there ever was one."
By considering aspects like uniqueness, creativity, originality and clarity, the group graded the advertisements on a scale of one to 10 as they appeared during the game. Promotional, halftime and locally produced advertisements were not judged.
The grading of the Super Bowl ads was extended for the first time this year to give students, professors and professionals the opportunity to vote as well through an interactive Web site called MSU Ad Pulse.
"We weren't exactly sure what to expect," said Tom Szczepanski, managing director of Collaboration LLC, the company that created the site with MSU. "It's not just a Web site — it's a way to reach a lot of people in a very personal way."
A half hour after the Super Bowl, the site had more than 600 voters and hits from more than 13 countries. Voters chose their favorite ads based on the categories of Most Creative, Best Produced, Most Engaging, Most Likely to Drive Sales and Worst Investment. Most of the ads ranked comparatively to the professors' results.
Other ads that made the judges' top five included one for FedEx featuring cavemen and three from Anheuser-Busch — a stadium wave and Clydesdale horses for Budweiser and "the magic fridge" for Bud Light.
The advertisement for GoDaddy.com ranked last, with the ads for Westin Hotels & Resorts, Outback Steakhouse and the movies "Running Scared" and "The World's Fastest Indian" rounding out the bottom five.
Bonnie Reece, chairwoman for the department, said the blatant sexuality of the GoDaddy.com ad made it the most offensive, adding that it lacked direction.
"Even if you can laugh at it, at the end of the commercial you don't know what it is," Reece said.
GoDaddy.com is an Internet domain-registering Web site, founded by The Go Daddy Group Inc. in 1997.
For 30 seconds of national advertising, it cost $2.5 million — earning ABC about $150 million in revenue, Kolt said. He added that Lansing-area companies paid about $8,000 for the same amount of time.
The overall quality of the ads appeared to be less than previous years, several professors said.
"There's a real lack of originality," advertising Professor Bruce Vanden Bergh said. "You've got to get people, and none of this is interesting."
