Many viewers felt the ads that ran during the recent Super Bowl were pretty average.

Yes, Budweiser pulled on the heartstrings of viewers (as it does every year) and likely won the award for the most popular ad of a puppy’s friendship with a Clydesdale horse.

It has generated an amazing 42 million hits (so far) on YouTube, but with the mega-brewer now foreign-owned it seemed to ring a bit hollow.

Whether the Budweiser spot will actually encourage people to go and buy more beer is doubtful. But as purely an image ad it was effective.

The overall winner might have been Georgia personal injury lawyer Jamie Casino, who ran a superb and very slick two-minute spot (most commercials are 30 seconds) on WTOC, Savannah’s Fox affiliate.

According to a lengthy article in the New York Daily News (LINK), Casino’s goal for the spot was to clear his dead brother’s name after a former police chief had initially remarked that his brother was to blame for his own violent death in 2012.

Then Police Chief Willie Lovett (who retired in October amid sexual harassment allegations) referred to Casino’s brother as a “creep” and told the media in a press conference, “There were no innocent victims.”

Casino responded with his Super Bowl commercial.

The riveting and very professional ad has gone viral and is approaching three million hits on YouTube. In addition to the plethora of publicity he is receiving in all other forms of media, Casino may have very well pulled off the best media buy in history.