Tech Makes a Comeback In Super Bowl Ads

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After a 2009 game in which Vizio was the lone major CE manufacturer to run a Super Bowl television commercial, several ads for CE and CE-related products ran during Sunday's Super Bowl, amid other spots for cars, chips and beer. A roundup of this year's CE ads:

- Vizio returned this year with an ad featuring pop superstar Beyonce. But ironically, the singer only appeared in the first few seconds of the ad. She is grabbed with a robot, as are various videos, a Twitter logo, “Chocolate Rain” singer Tay Zonday and others. They are all “assembled” as parts of Vizio's Internet Apps, available on some of the brand's new TVs.

- Three different ads were featured for Qualcomm's FLO TV mobile television service, airing throughout the game. In the first, sports broadcaster Jim Nantz- who doubled as the game's play-by-play announcer- narrated a young man having “lost his spine,” and being forced to go shopping with his girlfriend during the big game. The solution, according to Nantz? Bring the FLO TV with him, and “change out of that skirt.

The second FLO TV ad was a remake of The Who's “My Generation,” featuring singer will.i.am, guitarist Slash and a highlight reel of events throughout the past five decades. And the third ad, featuring CBS pregame show host James Brown, demonstrated FLO TV's in-car version.

- Intel's spot featured a group of Intel employees eating in the company lunchroom, touting the company's new Core processors as what one of them describes as “the most amazing technological achievement in the history of the company.” This comes as news to a robot, serving as a waiter to the employees, who gets discouraged and walks away.

- A spot for Boost Mobile reunited members of the 1985 Chicago Bears, including quarterback Jim McMahon and coach Mike Dikta, in a remake of their famed “Super Bowl Shuffle” music video.

- The text message-based answering service KGB ran its first-ever ad, by demonstrating two skinny man squaring off against a sumo wrestler, and racing each other to find the Japanese translation for “I surrender.” One used KGB, the other simply browsed the web.

- In an ad for Motorola's new Devour phone- not mentioned by name in the ad- actress Megan Fox sits in a bathtub, contemplating whether to email out a picture of herself. And she imagines the chaos that would ensue, she ultimately thinks better of it.

- Google, in more than a decade of operation, never ran a television ad for its search engine, until Sunday- when it debuted a spot that was far and away the evening's most popular among Twitter chatterers. The ad features a series of Google searches, done by a young man interested in studying abroad in Paris- and then, later, searching for things to do in that city, translations, and more. Eventually, he's searching for cafes, chocolates, relationship advice, a church for a wedding and finally, tips on crib assembly.