A funny thing happened the week that Doritos announced their five picks for the Crash the Super Bowl finals.  As usual, a lot of media outlets and bloggers covered the contest and announced the start of the voting.  But instead of featuring one of the winning commercials in their stories, a lot of writers chose to embed a video that didn’t actually make the final five.  The ad is called “Make Your Own” and it is weirdly hilarious.  If you haven’t seen it, here it is:
 

 
The reason why all these news outlets decided to feature the same, non-winning video is kind of a mystery.  I remember that the official Crash the Super Bowl winners were already on youtube the day the results were announced so all those journalists could have just posted one of the official ads.  At first I thought maybe someone, somewhere had falsely reported that Make Your Own had made the top five and other writers had picked up the false lead.  But many of the articles I read actually lamented the fact that this spot didn’t make the finals.  A piece on the Huffington Post went so that Make Your Own “snubbed” despite being “brilliant.”

The entry went on to be featured on the front page of Yahoo, CBS This Morning, NBCsports.com, Mashable and a ton of other websites.  But things really got crazy when Make Your Own appeared on the front page of Reddit.  After that the video just went fully viral.  Today, Make Your Own has recived 2,378,000 views on youtube.  Here are the current stats for the five videos that actually did win the contest this year:
 

Man’s Best Friend:  199,903 views

Hot Wild Girls:  199,966 views

Bird of Prey: 200,486 views

Dog Park: 128,736 views

Sling Baby:  112,536 views

Combined total views:  841,627

 
So Make Your Own has a view count almost three times larger than all the finalist ads combined!  That is simply an amazing accomplishment and it’s certainly no fluke.  This is an awesome submission and I think it would have made a kick-ass finalist.  The hilarious dude playing the host is named Byron Brown.  The concept is great but I think it’s the Brown’s performance that added just a bit of insane magic to this ad.  The guys who actually made this entry are three friends from Austin TX; David Ward, Jack Dreesen and John Ramsey.  This is their third year entering the Crash the Super Bowl contest and this time around they shot 3 (very good) submissions.  You can seen all their various entries on Ward’s   Oh wait a second….as I’m writing this I just noticed these guys created one of my favorite Doritos submissions of last year’s contest!
 

 
Back to Make Your Own; because the ad has become so popular, the producers have been asking fans to tweet at Doritos and ask them to “reconsider” their entry.  Obviously it’s way too late for this ad to become a finalist but Doritos does love to pull surprises on Super Bowl night.  I think it would be freaking amazing if they actually decided to run this spot; if not during the superbowl then maybe at some later date.  After all, I think Doritos really owes these guys.  Look at all the free advertising they got out of this one entry that didn’t win a dime!  If Fritolay were paying one cent per view, they would owe the producers of Make Your Own more than $23,500!  if you’d like to join the campaign to get Doritos to air this ad, click here: