Flamin’ Hot Flashback: When Doritos Pushed Humor Back on the Ad Agenda

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It’s another Super Bowl flashback in Ad Of The Week – as the game gets ever nearer we’re going back to some ads from recent Super Bowls that offer lessons in how to maximise the opportunities offered by the biggest night in advertising. This week we’re revisiting 2022, and an ad from Doritos and agency Silverstein & Partners which helped spark the “humor renaissance” we’ve seen across recent years.

Doritos and humor have been a winning Super Bowl combination for a long time. Even during the mid-10s “sadvertising” era when heart-tugging narratives were more in fashion than big laughs, Doritos bucked the trend with its user-generated “Crash The Super Bowl” ads and regularly got top scores on our Test Your Ad platform. You can check out the most successful examples, like 2015’s hilarious “Dogs”, with the Test Your Ad Competitive Edge database, which collates 100,000 ads to provide an unrivalled overview of what works and what doesn’t in every category.

By 2022, after two long years of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was time for humor to make a comeback at the Super Bowl, and Doritos were the brand to do it. Their ad didn’t just rely on laughs, though. It mixed together cultural references, celebrity sparkle, and heart-warming cuteness alongside the funny stuff to create one of the most successful commercials of that year.

Let’s look through the successful elements Doritos brought together. The spine of the commercial is an 80s pop song – Salt N Pepa’s classic jam “Push It” – which creates the kind of familiar cultural reference that we know boosts ad effectiveness. But Doritos use it in a clever way, letting the track gradually emerge from animal noises as an explorer drops a pack of Flamin’ Hot Doritos in the jungle. It’s only right at the end of the commercial that we get the payoff of the full “Push It”, creating a peak at the end of the ad that makes it more effective.

The ad also subtly uses celebrities. You might not know that this version of the song is voiced by hitmakers Megan Thee Stallion and Charlie Puth, as they don’t appear in person. But their involvement let Doritos extend the ad across platforms, with social and static campaigns that leveraged more cultural touchpoints (linking Flamin’ Hot to Megan’s “Hot Girl Summer” hit, for instance). With most celebrity ads, the celebrities are front and centre – Doritos trusted in the idea to do the emotional work, and it paid off.

And finally, the ad has some great animation work. Animals are often a winning element in ads – they’re cute, they make people happy, and they’re memorable. Here the beatboxing sloths and singing birds instantly made Doritos’ ad stand out from the more human-oriented offerings of Super Bowl 2022. Plus, let’s face it, animals are funny! The scores for the ad speak volumes – 4.9-Stars, one of the highest ratings of the 2022 Super Bowl.

Since Doritos’ jungle antics we’ve seen more brands embrace humor on game night, and we’ve also seen a slow rise in the average Super Bowl Star Rating. For 2026, we’ll once again be testing all Super Bowl ads live on the night – sign up for our coverage here – and we’re expecting humor to be a big part of the story. But it’s still rare for an ad to match humor, culture, celebrity and cuteness with as much skill as Doritos did four years ago.