If you have Tivo or another DVR you already know how it changes your life. Shows like Sixty Minutes become Forty Minutes without commercial interruptions.  It’s great.

Like it or not, most people do not want to watch advertising.  Except, of course, during the Super Bowl – the one day of the year that advertisers get a free “Get Out of Jail” card.

Now this may seem un-American of me, but I am not a football fan.  But I do like advertising (naturally).  So this year I used my Tivo to record the Super Bowl so I could skip the game and just watch the ads.  Sort of Tivo in reverse.

I’m not going to slam or praise this year’s ads. There are enough people blogging about that. I simply want to make a few observations.

Not only do we have Tivo turning ad viewing upside down; but many of this year’s TV ads were just conversation starters.  Most of the dialogue took place on the web—before and after the game.

Chevy ran the Chevy Super Bowl Ad Challenge in which they asked college students to create this year’s Super Bowl ad.  Katie Crabb of the University of Wisconsin came up with the prize winning male strippers ad.

Doritos also ran a user generated content contest called “Crash the Superbowl.” Prior to the game, viewers voted for the best spot online. Though labeled “amateur” the spot was better than many of the “professional” spots that ran during the game.

And of course all of the good ads got passed around the web the next day extending the life of the ad well beyond the 30 second spot that now costs the same as the annual GDP for most mid-sized European countries.

So where is all this going?  Who knows? In a year marked by Time Magazine declaring YOU the person of the year, I suspect we’ll see a lot more user-generated content.  But it’s all still a great experiment. Not everyone can write. Not everyone can tell a story. Great content will win out—regardless of who created it.

But I hope this sort of thing doesn’t carry over into other fields of endeavor.  Can you imagine user-generated surgery? Hey, wait a minute. We might be on to something…