Five greatest Super Bowl ads of all time (+video)

3. 'Cat Herders,' EDS (2000)

More often than not, the most memorable Super Bowl commercial in a given year is also the funniest. And most hilarious of them all just might be ”Cat Herders,” which made its debut during Super Bowl XXXIV. The detail work in this one is just exquisite, from the cowboy taking a lint roller to his jacket to the aerial special effects shot of hundreds of cats fording a river. In a hyped up Super Bowl ad landscape in which every company is trying to have the loudest, funniest spot, this ad is arguably the most memorable of the past 15 years. 

The commercial has even outlasted the company it advertises. EDS, a digital management firm, was absorbed by Hewlett-Packard in 2008. 

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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