This Sunday, 238 people gathered in auditoriums in McLean, Virginia, and Chicago, for all of $50 apiece, will be the most influential people in all of advertising.

In theory, all that they'll be doing is gorging on salty snacks and watching the Super Bowl, just like millions of other Americans. But they will also be rating commercials for USA Today's Ad Meter poll, and their opinions will have a surprisingly profound, sometimes disastrous effect on the advertising industry.

The fates of personal careers, national brands, and international advertising agencies hang in the balance.

Just ask the principals at Chicago's Cramer-Krasselt agency, which last year created several commercials for its $60 million dollar a year client, Careerbuilder.com.

After none of Careerbuilder's three spots failed to crack USA Today's Ad Meter Top 10 -- its best was ranked 16th -- the client put its account up for review, effectively ending its five-year relationship with Cramer-Krasselt.

 "To our amazement, to our total astonishment, all that astounding business success was less important than one poll," Cramer-Krasselt President Peter Krivkovich wrote in an internal memo that found its way to Adweek (subscription required).  "It's so ludicrous and they are so serious about that poll it's almost funny."

Understandably, Cramer-Krasselt's take on the Ad Meter is different from that of the folks at DDB Chicago, whose mega client Anheuser-Busch's Bud Light had seven of the Top 10 spots in the Ad Meter rankings last year.  

DDB Group Creative Director Mark Gross takes obvious pride while rolling off stats about his agency's success with the meter, and he admits that it takes a certain type of spot to crack the code: "Visually driven comedy, based upon a simple story line, with a surprise that leaves you smiling."

Jim Norman, USA Today's polling editor and the man who runs the Ad Meter, said the top-rated commercial ever was a 1995 Pepsi commercial that featured a boy trying so hard to get the last drop that he sucked himself right into the bottle. It scored 9.66 out of 10.

By comparison, last year's highest-rated commercial was Bud Light's "Crabs Worshipping Ice Chest" which scored 8.56; the lowest, at 4.05, was the lone ad for Salesgenie.com.