After bringing "Whassup," Budweiser's pop-culture powerhouse of a campaign, to the Super Bowl in 2000 with one 30-second ad ("Whassup Girlfriend"), the brewer went even bigger in 2001 with two ads totaling 90 seconds. This one by DDB is the more epic of the pair, pulling in Super Bowl ad mainstays dogs and aliens in lieu of the usual guys on the phone. And with that it squeaked into the top 10 of the 2001 USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter, narrowly edging out a Cingular spot ("Touchdown Dance School").

The other "Whassup" commercial of the game belonged to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, a sibling of DDB within Omnicom that rendered the catchphrase to fine effect as "What Are You Doing?" 

Together they "succeeded in taking advertising's hottest series of commercials into a new year," The New York Times reported after the game:

The Whassup campaign has won practically every award in advertising, including the prestigious international Grand Prix, and its signature catch phrase is joked about on talk shows, parodied on Web sites and mimicked in other commercials.

And, most important to Anheuser-Busch, the nation's largest brewer, the campaign has helped it sell more beer, not just Budweiser but its light beer, Bud Light. The company's worldwide sales grew by 2.4 million barrels, to 99.2 million barrels last year, according to Beer Marketer's Insights, a trade newsletter in Nanuet, N.Y.

BRAND: Budweiser

YEAR: 2001

AGENCY: DDB

SUPERBOWL: XXXV