Doritos: Ad Of The Week

The Super Bowl is over. But that doesn’t mean its ads should be. For sensible brands, the big game is only the beginning of an ad’s value, and the subsequent weeks always see a flow of shortened and alternative versions showing up on TV. It’s important for a campaign to work on advertising’s biggest night of the year – but it’s also important for that campaign to keep on working, something Tide understood when they kept on releasing follow-ups to their 5-Star “Super Bowl Takeover” ads throughout 2018.

So this week’s Ad Of The Week is an example of a Super Bowl follow-up ad which doesn’t just recycle its parent, it improves on it. Doritos’ team-up of Sam Elliott and Lil Nas X hit 5.1 Stars on game night, coming third in our event rankings. But this 15s edit – cutting the length by half – hits 5.4 Stars, which would have placed it top on Super Bowl night.

How did Doritos manage to half the length of its ad and still boost its emotional appeal? It’s a tough act to pull off, after all. Our meta-analysis across thousands of Test Your Ad commercials suggests that if there’s a sweet spot for ad length it’s around 30 seconds. Longer than that and there’s a risk of losing audience engagement. Shorter, and there’s the chance you’ll never build it in the first place.

Doritos dodge that bullet by understanding what people enjoyed most about its original ad. It turns the edit into a showcase of its finest elements – the face-off, the “Old Town Road” song, and Sam Elliott’s wriggling moustache. This moustache was a lovely throwaway joke in the 30 second ad, but it’s the climax of this 15 second edit, creating a peak of happiness for viewers to take away.

Edits are a neglected element of ad execution – they can give a commercial a new lease of life, and tighten up already strong work. But they can also ruin the narrative of an ad, losing moments of between-ness or jokes which appeal to people’s right brains, or simply ceasing to make sense as a 60-second story gets sped up into incoherence. Doritos have done a great job of cutting their ad while keeping everything that made it special.

How did Doritos manage to half the length of its ad and still boost its emotional appeal? It’s a tough act to pull off, after all. Our meta-analysis across thousands of Test Your Ad commercials suggests that if there’s a sweet spot for ad length it’s around 30 seconds. Longer than that and there’s a risk of losing audience engagement. Shorter, and there’s the chance you’ll never build it in the first place.

Doritos dodge that bullet by understanding what people enjoyed most about its original ad. It turns the edit into a showcase of its finest elements – the face-off, the “Old Town Road” song, and Sam Elliott’s wriggling moustache. This moustache was a lovely throwaway joke in the 30 second ad, but it’s the climax of this 15 second edit, creating a peak of happiness for viewers to take away.

Edits are a neglected element of ad execution – they can give a commercial a new lease of life, and tighten up already strong work. But they can also ruin the narrative of an ad, losing moments of between-ness or jokes which appeal to people’s right brains, or simply ceasing to make sense as a 60-second story gets sped up into incoherence. Doritos have done a great job of cutting their ad while keeping everything that made it special.