This year it takes more than athletic abilities to end up in the Super Bowl XLVIII. It requires marketing and creative talent. On Super Bowl Sunday, Doritos will air ads from five finalists of the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl contest. Regardless of the winner, these five ads will become part of Doritos' ad campaign for the year.
Each finalist spent between $300 and $7,000 to create their ads, but the winner walks away with $1 million. Marketers will likely pay more attention to the ads than the game. The runner-up wins $50,000.
Aside from the million, the winners will get an opportunity to work with Marvel Studios on the set of "Marvel's The Avengers: Age of Ultron." All the ads are viewable on Google YouTube in advance of the big game. The finalists, selected from thousands of submissions, are "The Cowboy Kid" by Amber Gill, Ladera Ranch, Calif.; "Time Machine" by Ryan Andersen, Scottsdale, Ariz.; "Office Thief" by Chris Capel, Valencia, Calif.; "Finger Cleaner" by Thomas Noakes, Sydney, Australia; and "Breakroom Ostrich" by Eric Haviv, Atlanta, Ga.
Dallas-based Andrew Robinson at The Marketing Arm originally came up with the concept of the contest for Doritos. It has been running for about eight years.
Robinson should feel pretty darn proud about now. Super Bowl ads are roughly 40% more memorable than the average commercial, per Nielsen TV Brand Effect. On Wednesday the data firm introduced the Super Bowl Advertisers Hall of Fame and named Doritos ads as the most-liked ad two years running and the most memorable ad and brand for four years, placing the ads in the Super Bowl Advertisers Hall of Fame.
Doritos' use of relatable characters and unexpected, humorous plot twists "jolted viewers and elevated the brand's ads" --creating content worth remembering, talking about, and sharing. The ads also appeal to the audiences' sense of humor, per Nielsen.
Other Nielsen inductees include GoDaddy, Budweiser, Coca-Cola, and E-Trade.
The ranking looks a bit different in Google search queries. Aside from ads, last year during the game the top trending searches on Google in the U.S. were M&M's, Beyonce, Baltimore Ravens, San Francisco 49ers, Colin Kaepernick. In 2012, Google reported that 41% of Super Bowl-related searches came from mobile.