NetBoxie

To me, the biggest surprise of yesterday’s Super Bowl—after New Orleans’ underdog victory, of course—was the plethora of ads (well, eight by my count, not including those for Web sites) for electronics products and services.

I can’t remember a Big Game where advertising for gear was quite so prominent. And, to me, all of the electronics ads were entertaining, even if few conveyed real news or even any hard information.

Here were my three favorites, with links so you can watch and judge them for yourselves:

1. Google: Parisian Love. A clever way to reinforce Google’s ubiquity in our lives, this ad was an extended video screen shot of a succession of searches, leading the searcher from visiting Paris to meeting a mate to marriage to parenthood. Where most Superbowl ads are frenetic and last for mere seconds, this ad offered a full minute of poetic calm. (Video after the jump.)

2. Flo TV: Spineless. Sure, an ad (in this case for Qualcomm’s mobile TV device) that portrays a male sports fan as captive to his girlfriend’s weekend shopping expedition is sexist and sophomoric. But to me, this added enough wit to forgive those themes and extract humor from its political incorrectness.

3. KGB: Sumo Wrestling. Introducing a new cell-phone service that answers your questions for 99 cents, this ad pitted a KGB user against a Web surfer, as both tried to get a Japanese translation of “I surrender” in time to avoid a pummelling.

(The ad succeeded, in that I couldn’t resist texting a question to KGB this morning. In less than two minutes, the service successfully identified Ollie Halsall, the dazzlingly brilliant guitarist in the ultra-obscure ’70s English band Patto, and even added the fact that he was also played keyboards and sang.)

I liked the other electronics ads, too, includingVizio’s ad for its suite of Internet apps, with its image of a still-singing Beyoncé being dropped into the maw by a giant mechanical arm; Intel’s lunchroom spot, in which a table-serving robot has his feelings hurt when new Intel chips are touted as the best product the company’s ever created; and an ad in which Megan Fox snaps and sends a photo of herself in the bathtub with a Motorola phone, triggering a series of disasters involving distracted men—even though my enthusiasm for the latter was deemed (lovingly) by my wife to be “slightly pathetic”…

What were your favorite ads from last night, electronics or otherwise?

—Paul Reynolds