Call me crazy but I think Frito-Lay’s PR department might have pitched a story idea to AdWeek as a response to an article I wrote just before the Super Bowl.  On January 29th I posted this friendly critique of Doritos’ new Crash the Super Bowl facebook app: Did a poorly-designed Facebook app almost ruin this year’s Crash the Super Bowl contest?

Here’s the TL;DR version of that article: Doritos’ new CTSB app suuuucked.  Only 12 videos would load at a time so watching multiple entries was a complete hassle.  (The old CSTB video galley was incredibly user-friendly.  It was hosted on a dedicated website and hundreds of video thumbnails would load at a time.)  The facebook app was also a spammy privacy killer.  If you allowed the app, your facebook friends were bombarded with updates about your CTSB activities.  I thought that I had selected the “Only Me” option but Doritos kept posting junk about me and I didn’t even realize it.

The was the first year that FritoLay ran The Crash on facebook.  Coincidentally, it was also the first year that FritoLay saw a decrease in the number of entries they received.  The 2011-2012 installment of the CTSB contest netted about 6,000 submissions.  I did a quick and dirty count and this year it looks like fewer than 3,000 entries were uploaded.  The prizes and rules were about the same so I blamed this 50% drop in participation on the crappy facebook app.  Since fans weren’t able to watch a ton of low-quality entries, they weren’t inspired to go out and shoot better commercials of their own.

About a week after I posted my story, AdWeek ran their own article about the Crash the Super Bowl facebook app:  Frito-Lay Likes the Data From Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl: Facebook-anchored effort hits 100 million views  Have you ever read an article that breaks down the performance data of a Facebook app?  Yeah, me either.  I don’t think anyone at AdWeek would notice or care that The Crash had moved to Facebook.  So someone on FritoLay’s PR team probably contacted a journalist-friend and pitched a positive story about the app to counter the bad press they had received (i.e., that brilliant a-hole Beardy’s story on VideoContestNews.com).

Here are the first few paragraphs of the AdWeek story:

Doritos’ decision to move its seventh annual “Crash the Super Bowl” campaign to Facebook proved to be a winner. The Frito-Lay brand—which had anchored the effort on a microsite in years past—drew nearly 100 million views for the five finalist videos in the user-generated contest, breaking its record.

“Almost every single metric of the program exceeded what we achieved during the last six years,” Ram Krishnan, vp of marketing at Frito-Lay, told Adweek. Krishnan said Facebook’s social nature helped the videos go viral. “That’s the whole reason why we switched,” he said. “People like to talk about the videos, and that reaches their circle of friends.”

What’s more, visits to its Facebook app page were up 100 percent compared to last year on the microsite, said Dena von Werssowetz, Frito-Lay marketing manager. Doritos’ Facebook fans increased substantially, von Werssowetz suggested, eclipsing the 4 million mark for the first time on the social site.

Her brand ran the full gamut of Facebook ads—Reach Block, Marketplace, Sponsored Stories and Promoted Posts—to drive interest in the “Crash” initiative. (A spend figure wasn’t disclosed.) Around 3,500 videos were submitted from Oct. 8 through Nov. 16, 2012, via the brand’s Facebook app.

Her brand ran the full gamut of Facebook ads—Reach Block, Marketplace, Sponsored Stories and Promoted Posts—to drive interest in the “Crash” initiative. (A spend figure wasn’t disclosed.) Around 3,500 videos were submitted from Oct. 8 through Nov. 16, 2012, via the brand’s Facebook app.

I’m pretty sure this article was the first time that FritoLay revealed how many entries were submitted this year.  Like I said, I did a quick count and I only saw about 2,800 videos; and that’s the number I published in my original article.  3,500 just sounds way too high and I have a feeling that Doritos may have tweaked their finally tally a bit.  Maybe the official figure includes duplicate entries that didn’t appear in the facebook gallery…or maybe I’m just bad at counting, I don’t know.

So anyway, the new CTSB facebook app didn’t suck….at least from a marketing standpoint.  It did what it was supposed to do; it generated tons and tons and tons of free publicity for Doritos.  100 million views sounds like a ridiculously amazing accomplishment but these “views” aren’t really VIEWS.  They are impressions.  If you voted for one of the Crash the Super Bowl finalists, your facebook friends would see an alert in their news feed.  If one of your friends scrolled past that alert,  that counted as a “view.”  So I’m guessing that most of these views were just junk traffic.   But even if it wasn’t, a ton of free hits isn’t worth it if you annoy and inconvenience your target audience.  The goal of the CTSB contest is to find great Doritos commercials.  Are 100 million, 2-second long casual facebook views really worth it if the contest also experiences a 45% to 60% drop in the number of entries that are uploaded?

The AdWeek article is short and worth a read.  But you’re probably feelin’ lazy today so I’ll just copy and paste one more bit of interesting info:

And it sounds likely that Doritos will run the “Crash” initiative again next year. “This is the best amplification of our brand narrative,” Klein said. “We just continue to be blown away by the creativity of Doritos fans.”

FritoLay probably wouldn’t let AdWeek run this line if they had any doubt about the future of the contest.  So I think there almost certainly will be a 2013-2014 installment of the Crash the Super Bowl contest.