Italian
Doritos comes in flavors that run the gamut from Cool Ranch to Flamin’ Hot Limon. When it comes to Super Bowl LIX, executives behind the popular chip will focus on a classic recipe.
Frito-Lay, the snack-food giant that is part of PepsiCo, is relaunching Doritos’ famous “Crash the Super Bowl” contest this year and has narrowed down thousands of entries into 25 semi-finalists whose efforts to create a big-screen Super Bowl ad could pay off big time. Any winners will have a chance for their ad to be aired during the Big Game and win $1 million.
For PepsiCo and Frito-Lay, that will only add to the costs of playing in the Super Bowl. Fox, which plans to televise the grand event on February 9, has sought more than $7 million from some 30-second ad berths,
Even though modern aspirants have all kinds of new technology at their beck and call, ranging from high-tech smartphone cameras to a suite of digital video-editing tools, “I still think you have to have a great idea,” says Chris Bellinger, chief creative officer at PepsiCo’s food operations. “It’s gotta have a certain amount of polish. It’s got to have a certain amount of humor.”
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Doritos is about to open a second chapter in its bid to cultivate winning Super Bowl ad concepts not from the nation’s big ad agencies, but rather from the consumers they hope to attract. Many of the bids that have prevailed so far in the contest look as sophisticated as anything that might come out of a Madison Avenue firm like BBDO, McCann Worldwide or Ogilvy.
One candidate has devised a commercial in which three guys shrink themselves down to ant-size so they can enjoy the Doritos crumbs in the bottom of a bag., Another features a senior couple using a single pair of dentures to enjoy the snack they love so much. A third uses science fiction as a backdrop and treats Doritos bold flavor as a living entity…that has escaped.
“It’s really cool, because there are ideas that come out left field, and they are just so unique,” says Bellinger. “There are some areas that you never thought [Doritos] could play in this space, but they are really funny. I’ve seen a sci-fi spot, and drama.”
The company will use an internal process to narrow down the candidates. “You can imagine the stakeholders who are involved,” the executive says.
Frito-Lay will find out whether the do-it-yourself concept still has appeal. The original “Crash” debuted in 2007, just as YouTube and what was once known as “user-generated content” were gaining traction with U.S. consumers. Facebook was in its relative infancy. Media outlets worried about whether they could air commercials and other content create without expert production and that looked “lo-fi.”
Still, by 2015, it was clear the idea had run its course, even if the idea of letting individuals create popular content continued to thrive. Doritos pivoted to other ideas after one last bootstrapping salvo, when director Zack Synder agreed to help top entrants. “At that point, it was clear there was a shift,” says Bellinger. More Super Bowl advertisers were relying on celebrities, and “long form was becoming more prolific” among Big Game sponsors. “We were seeing more 60s, more two-minutes.” Doritos wanted to spotlight new flavors and snacking occasions. In 2018, PepsiCo ran a single ad that touted a new spicy iteration of Doritos and a new lemon-lime variant of Mountain Dew.
A return in 2025 comes as individual’s ability to create anything from a newsletter or podcast to an entire media empire has never been easier to develop. In 2007, an aspiring Doritos ad-maker like Jared Cicon, then a wedding photographer, was seen as an outlier. Today, a smart creator might become a massive influencer on the order of Alex Cooper.
