Today is October 3rd, which means that the 2011/2012 Installment of the Crash the Super Bowl contest is officially underway!  You have until Monday, November 21st to get your commercials submitted but you might as well get to work sooner rather than later.  But before you pick up a camera or even open up your screenwriting software the first thing you should do is a little bit of RESEARCH.  Doritos has now run four installments of The Crash; 2006/2007, 2008/2009, 2009/2010 and 2010/2011.  Technically there was a 2007/2008 installment but it wasn’t a commercial contest.  That one was to find a singer who would have their song played during the Super Bowl.  Fortunately, it was kind of a flop so Doritos wisely brought back the commercial contest in 2008 and they’ve run it every year since.

So four previous installments mean that there are four year’s worth of winning videos that you can study.  So below, I am going to post every, single commercial that has ever made the finals in the Crash the Super Bowl contest.  If you watch them all you’ll notice that Doritos definitely has a certain look, style and attitude that they seem to prefer.  The judges clearly like:

1.  Violent Slapstick comedy, e.g. nut shots, tazers and electric shocks, hard falls.

2.  Jerks who abuse animals getting their comeuppance. 

3.  Surprise, twist endings

You’ll also notice that the judges unquestionably prefer High Quality productions. If the commercial isn’t TV quality, Doritos isn’t going to run it on TV. Even during the first year of the contest, all the selected ads were either shot in HD (pretty hard to come by in 2006!) or on film. Now last year, the Pepsi Max judges did pick a few finalists that were NOT tv quality. But that was essentially a different contest with a different set of judges. That’s why there was such a huge difference in the style of the finalists. I am going to post the Pepsi Max winners but just be aware that they are probably not a good indicator of what this year’s judges will be looking for. Enjoy!

UPDATE: It turns out that embedding two dozen youtube videos in one post is a great way to slow down the load time of a website!  So instead of posting all the videos below, I created a new page where you can watch all the ads.  So use this link to see the 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2011 Crash the Super Bowl finalist ads.