Doritos Takes The Lead On Search With “Crash The Super Bowl” Campaign

At $4 million for a 30 second ad spot, Super Bowl advertisers have been getting savvier at extending their campaigns to the weeks leading up to the big game. Last season we saw Bud Light, Volkswagen, Toyota, Butterfinger and other brands use paid search to promote their Super Bowl outlay. Doritos is ahead of the pack this year.

Doritos is the first 2015 Super Bowl advertiser to bring its campaign to Google, Bing and Yahoo search results for Super Bowl related queries. While other brands are still keeping their ads underwraps, Doritos is soliciting votes for its “Crash The Super Bowl 2015” ad finalists. On Google, we’ve seen the “Crash The Super Bowl 2015” ads start to appear on several Super Bowl ad-related queries. On Bing the ads also show on [super bowl].

For the ninth year in a row, the Frito-Lay brand asked people to create a 30-second Doritos ad as part of its “Crash The Super Bowl” contest in which the grand prize winner will go to the Super Bowl, see their ad air during the game, get a “dream job” at Universal Pictures and win $1 million. Ten finalists have been selected, now the public can vote for their favorite ad.

In its search campaign, Doritos calls on users to cast their votes for their favorite ad. The ads, at this point, don’t incorporated the #CrashTheSuperBowl hashtag the brand is using on Twitter. Instead the sitelinks in the ads promote the brands’ social presence on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube only with calls to “follow”, “like” and “watch”.

Doritos also appears to be the only Super Bowl advertiser that has switched its brand search campaign to Super Bowl mode, with the campaign appearing on searches for [doritos] and [doritos super bowl]. Other brands are still running their generic brand search ad campaigns.

Of course a big part of being out ahead of everyone is the contest aspect of the campaign, but we will be keeping an eye out for other Super Bowl XLIX advertisers to start turning on search as we lead up to the final playoff round this weekend and roll to the big game ton February 1st.