MADISON AVENUE may be rethinking a common belief about advertising on the Super Bowl — avoid buying spots that will run in the fourth quarter, for fear of blow-outs — after the second champion-ship in a row was decided in the final moments of play.

The commercials that NBC broadcast during the fourth quarter of Super Bowl XLIII fared well in many of the postgame polls and surveys that were released on Monday. In fact, the two commercials that were the most-watched in homes with TiVo digital video recorders were the final spots in the game: one for Bud Light Lime beer, sold by the Anheuser-Busch division of Anheuser-Busch InBev, and the other for the Web site registration service GoDaddy.com.

The GoDaddy.com commercial in the fourth quarter, which parodied a hearing on drug use in sports, had “far more viewership” than a commercial the company ran in the first quarter, said Todd Juenger, vice president and general manager for audience research and measurement at TiVo in Alviso, Calif. That was somewhat surprising because the first spot featured the race car driver Danica Patrick taking a shower. In the second spot, Ms. Patrick sat, clothed, at a conference table.

“There are two reasons a commercial gets a high rating” in a TiVo household, Mr. Juenger said: either it is rewound often and watched repeatedly or it “happens to be in the middle of” compelling programming that is watched over and over. In this instance, the spots for Bud Light Lime and GoDaddy.com were fortunate to be broadcast after the touchdown that put the Arizona Cardinals ahead and before the touchdown that enabled the Pittsburgh Steelers to reclaim the lead and win the game.

“It was a powerful fourth quarter, one of the best of all time,” said Peter Arnell, chairman and chief creative officer at Arnell in New York, an Omnicom Group agency that was involved in the creation of a commercial for Pepsi-Cola that was the third from last shown in the game. “As they used to say in the old days, people were glued to the tube,” he added. “We could not have been luckier.” The Pepsi-Cola North America Beverages division of PepsiCo decided on Saturday to run the commercial, which resembled a skit from “Saturday Night Live” featuring a character named MacGruber who parodies the old ABC series “MacGyver.”

The commercial — in which MacGruber endorses Pepsi and changes his name to PepSuber — also ran during the episode of “Saturday Night Live” shown on NBC the night before the Super Bowl, as one of three Pepsi-Cola spots that looked like MacGruber skits. The three spots, it turns out, are the first in a collaboration between PepsiCo and Lorne Michaels, the longtime executive producer of “Saturday Night Live.” The deal was arranged by Mr. Arnell and Ben Silverman, the co-chairman of NBC Entertainment, part of the NBC Universal unit of General Electric. “I didn’t think there was any compromise involved,” Mr. Michaels said in a telephone interview on Monday, adding: “I’m not prepared to sacrifice the credibility built up in the show for 34 years. It’s not for sale.” He said he agreed to the PepsiCo partnership because “this is a very hard time for the networks, and all sorts of new ways of doing things are being considered.” Mr. Michaels said he was not being paid by PepsiCo, “but the cast was and the people who write and direct were.” 

Asked how the partnership would proceed, Mr. Michaels replied, “As with all relationships, it’s day to day.”

“It’s terra incognito, if I can be grand for a bit,” he added. “The experience requires tremendous vigilance.”

There had been some discussion of running all three MacGruber Pepsi-Cola spots in the Super Bowl, Mr. Michaels said, but executives at PepsiCo North America Beverages decided to run one. The commercials are the first that Mr. Michaels has produced in his career, he said, adding that Seth Meyers, the head writer for “Saturday Night Live,” also produced the spots, which included “Saturday Night Live” talent like Will Forte, who portrays MacGruber, and Jorma Taccone, who directs the MacGruber skits. In the TiVo survey, the MacGruber Pepsi-Cola commercial finished eight. TiVo’s No. 10 spot, for the Coke Zero brand sold by the Coca-Cola Company, also appeared in the fourth quarter.

Four others in the TiVo top 10 ran in the third quarter of the game. They were for CareerBuilder.com; the film “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” to be re-leased by the Paramount Pictures division of Viacom; Monster.com; and Denny’s.

Only two of the TiVo top 10 were shown in the first half of the game: “Free Doritos,” a commercial created by consumers, and an Anheuser-Busch spot in which a man is tossed out a window for suggesting his company could save money by eliminating Bud Light at meetings. Both spots appeared early in the first quarter of the game. As that shows, not all the commercials that fared well in postgame tallies were concentrated in the second half. For instance, the Doritos commercial came in first in the annual Ad Meter survey conducted by USA Today, which won the creators — brothers named Joe and Dave Herbert, of Batesville, Ind. — a $1 million prize from the maker of Doritos, the Frito-Lay division of PepsiCo.

(A second Doritos commercial, which appeared in the second quarter, was also created by a consumer rather than professionals; that spot, by Eric Heimbold of Venice, Calif., finished fifth in the Ad Meter.) Another commercial shown in the second quarter, for the Budweiser beer brand sold by Anheuser-Busch, led a poll of Super Bowl spots conducted by the AOL division of Time Warner. The commercial, one of three for Budweiser, showed a Clydesdale outdoing a Dalmatian in fetching a stick. Still, of the rest of the top 10 in the AOL FanHouse poll (fan-house.com) as of Monday afternoon, two were shown in the fourth quarter: a spot for Hulu.com, a joint venture of NBC Universal and the News Corporation, and the Coke Zero spot.

And four AOL leaders were shown in the third quarter: a Budweiser commercial about the history of the Clydesdales, a Bridge-stone tire spot set on another planet, a Coca-Cola commercial in which insects steal a man’s Coke bottle and the Monster.com spot. YouTube, owned by Google, had a gallery of video clips of Super Bowl commercials (youtube.com/adblitz) where the most-watched commercial as of Monday afternoon was the Career-Builder.com spot from the third quarter. During the game, there was a 2,800 percent increase in searches on YouTube for the word Career-Builder, said Jeff Levick, vice president for marketing at Google, along with a 1,600 perent increase in searches for the word commercials. “It’s true convergence,” Mr. Levick said, as more people “are watching the Super Bowl with their laptops open,” which in turn feeds “the viral nature of ads after the Super Bowl.”

That was also demonstrated by numerous surveys on the responses to Super Bowl spots — before, during and after the game — on blogs and other Web sites and in search engine and mobile marketing. “We can’t say all advertisers get it, but it’s definitely trending in the right direction,” said Peter Hershberg, managing partner at Reprise Media in New York, part of the Mediabrands unit of the Interpublic Group of Companies, which released on Monday the results of its fifth annual Search Marketing Scorecard.

The number of Super Bowl advertisers that bought paid search ads tied to their commercials rose to a record 65 percent, according to the scorecard, compared with 54 percent in 2008 and as few as 21 percent in 2005. In a survey by Zeta Interactive, a digital marketing company in New York, the “Free Doritos” commercial created by the Herbert brothers came in first place. The survey tracked what it called the most “buzz worthy” spots of the Super Bowl, as determined by the volume and tone of online posts.

The rest of the top five in the Zeta survey were the Monster. com commercial; a spot for the Teleflora division of Roll International, in the second quarter; the Denny’s commercial; and a spot for Cars.com, also from the second quarter. And a survey of online conversations during the game, from Collective Intellect in Boulder, Colo., found Pepsi-Cola commercials in first place, with a 19 percent share, followed by spots for Coca-Cola and SoBe, another PepsiCo brand, tied at 12 percent.

Budweiser had 11 percent and two car companies were tied at 9 percent, the Audi division of Volkswagen of America and Hyundai Motor America. The nail-biting end to Super Bowl XLIII helped it rank as the second-most-watched Super Bowl, according to preliminary ratings on Monday from NBC and Nielsen Media Research. The estimated 95.4 million people watching the game trailed only the estimated 97.5 million who watched a year ago when the New York Giants defeated the New England Patriots in the final moments of Super Bowl XLII.