Tivo has announced that E-Trade’s talking, trading, barfing baby was the most watched ad by Tivo subscribers during the Super Bowl, followed by the Pepsi spot where Justin Timberlake got hit in the crotch, followed by the Doritos ad where a giant mouse wailed on a man eating chips. Tivo “sampled 10,000 households using anonymous, second-by-second audience measurement data” to come up with the rankings.

Tivo says that for the fifth year in a row (since the company started tracking viewership data, in fact) the commercials were more watched than the game, with the most popular ads enjoying a 5 to 30% larger audience because they’re re-watched repeatedly.

Nielsen disagrees and lists an entirely different set of winners—”Budweiser’s horse/Dalmatian spot, Coke’s parade balloons, Diet Pepsi’s Max, FedEx’s pigeons and Pepsi’s Timberlake.” Their data, however, comes from “200 people who were polled online,” so it sounds like typical Nielsen nonsense.

“TiVo: E-Trade Won Super Bowl” [BrandWeek]

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