Never use the Crash the Super Bowl contest as a chance to see your buddy's girlfriend topless
Man, time really files when you’re trying to come up with a great idea for a Doritos commercial! There’s now less than two weeks left until the deadline for the Crash the Super Bowl contest. So it’s Crunch Time, folks! (pun intended). But before you rush out and start filming, the first step in making a great Doritos commercial is research. Obviously, you should watch all the entries that won the previous installments of the Crash. But you should also try and figure out which concepts have already been done to death. While running this site, I’ve had the opportunity to watch literally thousands of Crash the SuperBowl entries. And there are a few common, played-out gimmicks that I see used over and over and over again. So I am going to do you a gigantic favor and list the Top 5 most over-used Crash the Super Bowl ideas! Every year, Dortios gets tons of videos that have almost identical plots and gags. The ideas might be new to the person who wrote the script but to the judges they are tired and totally unoriginal. So if you want to stand out from the crowd, here are the five concepts that you need to avoid. For each concept I’ll include an example and I’ll try to only post high-quality entries so you can see that even good production values won’t make these ideas seem fresh:
1. Doritos as “paper” footballs
Hey, have you ever noticed that a Dorito kind of looks like a paper football? If so, you’re not alone because apparently a lot of people have noticed that! Over the last five years, I bet fritolay has received hundreds of CTSB entries that featured Doritos being used as “paper footballs.” I’m guessing this idea is so popular because a paper football is about the only small, triangular object most people can think of. What’s crazy about this particular idea is that pretty much every Paper Football entry has the same plot. There is a tense and dramatic stand off between two competitors. The chip is “kicked” in slow motion but at the last second, there’s a twist! Someone jumps into frame and blocks the kick by catching the chip in their mouth.
I’ve been watching the new batch of submissions and already I have seen more than one version of this idea. But this concept is just too obvious. If a Paper Football-themed ad did make the finals, you’d have a hundred people coming forward claiming that the winners stole their idea!
2. Dressing up in a giant Doritos costume
This weekend, dozens of filmmakers across the country will go into their garages and apply the finishing touches to their homemade, giant Doritos costumes. Some of them will just be a single, orange sheet of poster board. Others will be meticulous, high quality suits that are made of foam and finished with an air-brushing of realistic orange and brown paint. But if Frito-lay hasn’t picked a CTSB finalist that featured a guy dressed as a Dorito by now, they are never going to. That’s because no matter how much work a person puts into their Dorito costume, the gag is just too easy. Think of it like this; if Bud Light made a Super Bowl commercial where the joke was that the characters were in homemade Bud Light suits, how do you think that commercial would do on the USA Today ad meter?
3. Zombies!
This idea has been totally done to death. (Pun intended again!) If you head to the Crash the Super Bowl gallery and watch 50 videos in a row, I bet you’d see at least one zombie-themed entry. In fact, I just searched the gallery for the word “zombie” and there are already five submissions with the word zombie in the title!
It’s easy to understand why Dortios gets so many zombie videos though. Zombies are super popular and the costumes are really easy to make. But it’s fascinating how similar all these zombie ads are. I’ll break down a typical story for you; a group of friends are running from hungry zombies. The friends get trapped and the zombies attack. But they don’t eat the people. It turns out one of them has Doritos and that’s what the zombies were after the whole time! Oh but once the Doritos run out, the zombies then turn on the people. The whole plot is so popular among video contest filmmakers that I did an entire blog post about the “Zombie Fake Out” trope. So even though zombie make up is probably 90% off right now at Walmart, resist the temptation to shoot a chip commercial about the undead.
4. Doritos as Mousetrap bait
Doritos are cheesy. So what do people do with cheese? Pretty much just two things; they either eat it or they catch mice with it. (seriously, try and think of something else you can do with cheese) A lot of CTSB filmmakers have made this connection over the years. In fact, one of them even made it to the super bowl thanks to this concept. Way back in 2006, Fritolay picked an ad named “MouseTrap” as one of the finalists in the very first installment of the Crash the Super Bowl contest. I’m sure you remember the commercial because it was so good that five years later, Doritos is still airing the spot on TV! In the ad, a man in a suit puts a piece of a dorito on a mousetrap. He then gets pummeled by a very angry guy in a mouse suit. The ad is so ubiquitous that it’s hard to believe that CTSB contestants keep doing gags about Doritos as mouse trap bait. Sometimes the mouse traps are small and sometimes the mousetraps are giant. Sometimes the mouse traps are meant for mice but usually they are meant for people. But no matter what kind of spin a filmmaker puts on this idea, it simply has already been done perfectly by a previous Crash the Super Bowl winner. For example, the moustrap video I posted above is actually pretty awesome. It even won a prize in Poptent’s video contest “Second Chance” assignment. The way the giant robots lumber slowly in the distance is just perfect. If it hadn’t been for the previous “Mousetrap” ad I think this robot entry could have made the finals last year. But the Crash is all about getting new, off the wall ideas so Doritos isn’t going to pick a finalist that features a “device” that’s already been used.
5. A “Sexy” Doritos Seduction
Let’s end on an over-done idea that I don’t mind so much; the Sexy Doritos seduction. These entries always play out the same way. A husband gets home after a hard day at work to find a trail of Doritos on the floor. He follows the trail and it leads to the bedroom. He opens the door to find his wife laying naked in bed…with only Doritos covering up her girly bits! Of course, sometimes the concept is flipped around and it’s a goofy looking dude laying in a bed full of Doritos. Either way, this gag is extremely common. Shoot an entry like this and all you’ll get for your troubles is a set of orange sheets.
If you’ve ever shot a Crash the Super Bowl entry about any of the ideas I just listed, I’m sorry if I offended you! I understand what it’s like to work hard on a video contest entry only to later realize that it was kind of unoriginal. But hopefully this post will help a few filmmakers avoid common, over-done ideas that simply don’t have much chance of winning.
