The fan-made Doritos Super Bowl ads show us how advertising does, and doesn’t, work

So, instead of hiring advertising experts at a creative agency to spend a year engineering the perfect Super Bowl spot, strategy and all, this fan competition, on the surface, appears to roll the creative dice to see what happens. Or maybe the team did spend a year crafting the perfect strategy... and the solution was, this roll of the dice.

But it is not exactly a hope and a prayer.

The scheme did bear fruit when it ran between 2007 and 2016. Fan-made ‘Goat 4 Sale’ and ‘House Rules’ apparently saw enough commercial success to inspire the return of this extra-cool competition.

So, are the rules of advertising intuitive enough for a ‘Doritos fan’ to know them? It’s worth pondering. By understanding the role of advertising, the different ways it can deliver and the behavioral heuristics that explain them, marketers can achieve repeatable success. That is effectiveness, or what we could call ‘Flamin’ Creative Roulette’.

There are now three Doritios entries in the running. I’ve applied system1 data to see which ads, if any, deserve to see game day.

Does advertising even work?

We cannot continue this column without mentioning the work of Andrew Ehrenberg and Frank Bass, which is now carried on by Byron Sharp, author of ‘How Brands Grow,’ at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in Australia.

The first rule of working in marketing effectiveness: don’t believe a single thing anyone tells you.

There are so many myths and assumptions made, it is always worth considering the basics like: does advertising even work?

Thankfully, it does. EBI has academic research showing that sales dip 25% after just two years for an extensive collection of brands that stopped advertising. The fall was steeper for brands that were already declining, suggesting that advertising creates some kind of marketing inertia.

Which leads us to how advertising even creates sales:

1. It reaches new or light brand buyers to introduce your brand. Again, with EBI showing us that most brand spend comes from these new buyers.

2. It makes brands come to mind on the buying occasion. It does this by building category-relevant memories to your brand so it leaps to mind when looking to purchase. Hence, we say the brand becomes salient, from the Latin “Salire”: to leap.

3. It makes your brand recognizable in life and in other ads by creating distinctive brand assets.

4. It creates an influential brand image that impacts how your brand is thought of, chosen, shared and used. You could call this a meaningful difference, where brands outperform important aspects compared to other brands to create a positive, favorable impression.

5. Life, time and your competition advertising will constantly erode all of that, so advertising’s (arguably) main job is to refresh all the above and stop memory decay.

Point one blasts over the idea of reach but could just as easily be seen, noticed and remembered. The word advertising comes from the Latin word “advertere”: to take note of.

Back to Doritos. If its Super Bowl spot doesn’t do some or most of the above, PepsiCo might as well toss $8m into a Flamin’ Hot fire pit. If you want to explore these five points more, I recommend reading everything Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp have published.

How do ads achieve the above?

There’s never been a better time to be an effective marketer with all the books, podcasts, talks, masterclasses, courses, white papers and articles from senior industry experts on the table. Paul Feldwick is one of these too-generous experts.

Legendary head of planning at the iconic London agency BMP for thirty years before taking on global strategy at DDB. There isn’t a thing about advertising and creativity that this man doesn’t know, and he dishes it all out in his two books for all to learn. He also kindly shared far too much over too many bottles of wine at The Groucho Club in Soho the other day [Editor’s Note: Finished with Dry January already Andrew?] That was the sort of hangover where you wake up smiling, wishing you took notes.

I agree with Paul when he says we will understand advertising better if we start by accepting we will never fully understand it.

But his work sharing the different advertising models is so clear and useful it inspired me to put together the below for a talk I did at King’s College.

Most campaigns use a variety of these models or just use one, depending on their specific goals. Media choice and creative work tie together to achieve the above, as we know the media is part of the message. There are two significant distinctions worth drawing for Super Bowl ads and any ad you want to have lasting effects.

Firstly between system 2 (rational effortful thought) and system 1 (subconscious easy stuff).

Do these Doritos ads need to convince everyone that they are the tastiest or the best? Should it be 30 seconds of shouting at the screen with this benefit?

Or should they play into the system 1 pathway of emotions, feelings and associations, putting on a show with a load of implicit messaging that changes their brand images for the good?

There’s plenty of evidence that if Doritos just want to sell a few more packs that week, lean into the former. If it wants to create a lasting effect, system 1 is the way. My favorite evidence of this is from Orlando Wood’s new course, Advertising Principles Explained.

The other distinction of note should be models that can and can’t create “fame.”

If you are deep down the effectiveness rabbit hole, you will see that word all the time. It is famous in effectiveness circles. In that mindset, we are not just talking about an emotional campaign but a campaign that was so emotional that viewers needed to tell others about it. Fame, again, literally comes from the Latin “fama”: rumor. Fame is good for effectiveness, as per the Long and Short of It by Binet and Field.

So how can Doritos create fame with this trio of ads?

As Orlando Wood shows in his A.P.E course, it must lean into “showmanship.” Ads must be packed full of “right-brain” creative features like character, story, humor and a clear sense of place.

That’s the secret sauce the Doritos execs should rig the vote in fa... *clears throat* … the Doritos fans should be voting for in this 100% legit fan competition.

I can throw charts and tables at you all day. And that’s because advertising works in mysterious ways.

Sure, more emotional campaigns usually lead to more profitable business effects. But there are always exceptions or campaigns doing solid work through other “models.”

Will the 2025 fan-made Dorito ads work? Let’s use all that thinking on these last three standing. I’ll use System1’s creative testing to ensure this isn’t just me spouting my opinion.

And an honourable mention to the PepsiCo marketing team who released an ad about the ads. A very meta-attempt at fanning those culture flames!

First up is ‘The Barbershop,’ made by high school sophomores and longtime filmmakers Zach Shenouda and Ryan Robinson.

Second, we have ‘Charades,’ which was created by Mark Blitch, a producer for a non-profit video production company.

Finally, we have ‘Abduction’ by Dylan Bradshaw and content creator Nate Norell, who are arguably the most famous of the three groups.

Grab the full testing reports here: The Barbershop, Charades and Abduction.

As you can see, all ads have similar levels of brand recognition (fluency). So there are no distinctiveness problems. They also all score rather highly on our “Spike Rating,” which is based on how product-centric the ad is and whether the messaging creates high engagement levels. In my research, this metric correlates well with same-week ROI and ad recall. Because of this, I reckon they will all do rather well at boosting short-term salience and driving more sales around the Super Bowl.

But for lasting effects, for me, there’s clearly one winner.

‘Abduction’ manages to put on a show for the hundreds of people in our testing leaving the majority of them surprised and delighted, with little apathy or negativity. This leaves the viewers feeling more intensely positive and boosts our ‘Star Rating’ much higher than the other two ads.

Importantly, we test every US TV ad like this, and the category average is 3.8 Stars, so while I think all ads are brilliant in different ways, for me, there’s one clear winner at 4.4 Stars. This even puts it in the top 15% of chip/crisp ads on US TV over the past seven years for being able to leave viewers feeling intensely positive about the brand.

So, my best guess.

Doritos brand manager.

If you’ve got this far.

Rig the election in favor of ‘Abduction.’ After three years in the effectiveness and creative measurement business, everything I know suggests it will lead to more profit in the long term.

Or I could be completely wrong.

One of the other ads may fan the flames of a ‘cultural shift’ in some way I can’t predict and create a load of fame. Or none of them may work, all three lack campaign consistency with previous ads, which we also know is important.

So maybe don’t run any of them and pretend the website crashed.

But who am I to have this opinion? Well, in February 2024, I spent a week in System1’s Super Bowl bunker with a team of researchers testing all 80+ ads with thousands of real people to provide similar analysis on every single Super Bowl campaign. You can sign up to get that research here. Or, if you think the above is totally wrong, let me know which ad you’d pick and why on LinkedIn.

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