• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, September 23, 2024

As a culture, we’ve been bathing in nostalgia lately, especially in advertising. Several brands are reviving ads from the 1970s to the 2000s, giving them an update or just delighting viewers with work that had pop cultural swagger back in the day -- and still connects.

In the beauty brand space, for example, Maybelline has done cleverly updated social riffs on the ‘90s tag line, “Maybe it’s Maybelline.”  And Cover Girl has brought back a snipper of a vintage black-and-white commercial, with the funny add-on effect of various contemporary female models mouthing the original male voiceover.

All this brand nostalgia is also becoming part of the increasing IP-ification of advertising.  Just as with entertainment genres such as the Marvel Universe or Star Wars, there’s enormous possibility in historical ad work that it still living in our collective memory banks and the country’s cultural DNA. Plus, nostalgia captures people’s emotions and attention in a different way than newer work does.

Nowhere is this clearer than with PepsiCo bringing back “Doritos Crash the Super Bowl.”   The campaign originally broke in 2006, way back on that world wide web, when Doritos invited fans to develop their own homemade Super Bowl commercials to win prize money and eternal fame.

Those pieces of IP -- some 30,000 submissions collected over the 10 years -- were then known as consumer-generated ads, and at that point, anything with “generated” in the title sounded like it came from the future.

“Crash the Super Bowl” ran until 2016, and the result was wildly popular work that ranked number one on the USA Today Ad Meter four times and ranked within the top five every single year. Plus, it had a democratizing effect on the industry, bringing a scrappy, upstart, populist energy to otherwise corporate proceedings.

I remember that in 2007, the second year of the contest, I interviewed the husband-and-wife team who made that year’s winner, “Live the Flavor.”

They were West Phillips, then 22, and Dale Backus, who was 21, who told me that they couldn’t afford a dolly, so they had had a friend on rollerblades shoot the commercial. Thus, they claimed that the cost of making their ad was $12.95, spent entirely on bags of Doritos that got crushed during the video-making process.

So for less than $15, their spot made the Ad Meter top 10.

Which was awkward for creatives in the industry.  “Regular people” had put humongously more expensive professional work from established agencies to shame.

It’s been eight years since the last of the consumer-generated ads ran, and smart phone tools have grown exponentially, as have the social media outlets (hello, TikTok). Now even nine-year-olds are shooting, cutting and uploading videos these days.

The reintroductory campaign has a clever patina. Snippets of two previous winning spots, “Goat 4 Sale” and “Slap,”  are being shown in new spots, this time intertwined with the meanest social media comments they engendered originally.   The use of the comments (like “so dumb”) is unexpected and hilarious, a way to add a self-aware layer of critical zing. Some of the comments (one-liners) will get their own billboards, as if to say, “So you think you can do better?”

“Create our next Super Bowl ad for the chance to win a million dollars” is the direct line that reintroduces the contest, and I assume the competition will be rough.

Submissions will be accepted through Nov. 11. Then, judges will pick 25 spots -- one for each year the contest aired originally. Those will then get winnowed to three finalists, which fans can vote on at DoritosCrash.com.

The winner/creator then gets the $1 million and an all-expense-paid trip to New Orleans to see the spot run on the Big One Feb. 9.

And thus, more content goes into the hopper to become pop cultural fodder, and eventually, IP gold. Perhaps this year’s winner, too, will become the object of intense nostalgia and get recycled for the SB in 2045, when viewers will appreciate the “simpler” and “more innocent” time in which it was made, before AI fully took over (or whatever it’s going to do).