Top 3

Clydesdale Balboa

A Clydesdale horse doesn’t make the Budweiser team but finds a friend in a Dalmatian that trains the horse. With “Gonna Fly Now,” by Bill Conti, playing in the background, the horse channels his inner Rocky as he runs through the woods and pulls train cars.

“It tugs at the heartstrings,” said Pat Huddleston, a retailing professor. “I thought it was clever and creative.”

Bruce Vanden Bergh, an advertising professor, said it went away from the norm.

“That was the only one that had any emotion,” Vanden Bergh said. “Everyone else tries to be funny in the Super Bowl.”

Bridgestone scare

Just finding an acorn, a squirrel ventures into the middle of the road. As a car comes at the squirrel, it screams, setting off a chain of screams throughout the forest. Calmly, the driver swerves around the squirrel, leaving everybody safe.

“It was extremely well done,” Kolt said. “Any sort of animal seems to score high.”

Baby trader

A baby introduces himself through a webcam, saying he’s not too young to trade using E-Trade. After he makes the trade, he spits up his lunch.

“You’ve seen that concept done before where you’ve seen babies talk like grown people,” Vanden Bergh said. “E-Trade has always done something funny. They had a dancing monkey one year, where they said you probably wondered why we wasted two and a half-million dollars on this spot, invest your money wisely. They’ve always had some quirky sort of thing and they executed it and they did it well.”

Worst

GMC mountaintop

A painting pushes a ball up a hill, “Never saying never.” The GMC Yukon Hybrid is revealed touting better fuel mileage.

“You would think General Motors would have better taste in what they put in the Super Bowl,” Kolt said.