This summer I’m taking a trip to New Orleans and a few nights ago I stayed up late looking at flights and hotels.  When I finally went to bed, I had a nightmare.  I dreamed that I was walking down Bourbon Street with my friends and it was a nice hot sunny day.  But then I started to notice something strange.  Everyone in the city was putting up Christmas decorations.  They were stringing lights up above us and hanging wreaths from the balconies.  I flipped out and started running around yelling at everyone Twilight Zone-style, “What are you people doing!?  It’s too soon!  Christmas is seven months away!  It’s too soon for this!  It’s summer time!!!”

That dream has been on my mind today because I’ve been trying to decide if it’s too soon to start posting about this year’s Crash The Super Bowl contest.  Like Christmas, Doritos season seems to begin earlier and earlier every year.  It used to be that I’d start getting e-mails about The Crash after the 4th of July.  But over the last few weeks a good number of people (online and in the real world) have asked me about this year’s contest. So even though the last installment ended only about 3 months ago, I figured I’d do a post and answer two frequently asked questions:

Q:  Is Doritos doing the Crash the Super Bowl contest again this year?  A:  Frankly, I don’t know.  Doritos always keeps a tight lid of the details of the contest.  But I’d be willing to bet 10 bags of Cool ranch chips that the Crash will return this fall.  A few days after the Super Bowl, Ad Week ran a story about how thrilled FritoLay was with the “data” from the 2012-2013 CTSB contest.  The article concluded with this statement:

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.”

I’m guessing the rep from Fritolay dropped a lot of off-the-record hints during his interview but the reporter wasn’t allowed to come out and confirm that the contest would come back for 2014.

 Q:  When will Doritos announce the contest?  A:  FritoLay usually announces the details of The Crash in different stages.  Last year they announced on September 6th that they were going to officially announce the contest on September 18th.  Then when the 18th arrived FritoLay announced that the contest would begin on October 8th.

So if Doritos sticks to the same schedule (they usually do) we still have about 4 months before we learn whether or not the contest is coming back this year.  That might seem like a long ways away but 4 months isn’t really a ton of time.  So I don’t think it’s too soon to start thinking about ideas and making tentative plans.  I have a good feeling about this year’s Crash the Super Bowl contest and I’m looking forward to it.  About 6 weeks ago, Doritos officially changed the design of all of their bags.  They haven’t updated their designs since 2006 and that just happened to be the first year the CTSB contest was launched.  I sort of hated those bright red, shiny bags.  They were a real bitch to light.  These new bags look a little less reflective so they’ll look nicer on camera.  Now that I think about it, Doritos will need to create new video “end tags” for the Crash the Super Bowl contest since this logo…..

has been retired.  Man, maybe this year FritoLay will decide to freshen up the whole CTSB tool kit and provide filmmakers with a “Doritos Crunch” sound effect that doesn’t sound so creepy and fake!

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