How the Doritos fan-made Super Bowl ad won the competition after just 3 weeks of production

Content creators aren’t just appearing in Super Bowl commercials this year—they’re stepping behind the camera for the biggest advertising event of the year. Earlier this week, Doritos named director duo Dylan Bradshaw and Nate Norell the winners of its revived “Crash the Super Bowl” contest, which challenged creators and brand fans to produce a 30-second Super Bowl ad for Doritos without using AI imagery. At the start of the year, the brand narrowed down thousands of submissions to 25 semifinalists, then let netizens vote for their favorite to determine the winning ad. Bradshaw and Norell’s ad “Abduction,” which features an extraterrestrial tug-of-war between an alien and a UFO fanatic over a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos, won and will air during the first quarter of the Big Game. Doritos also awarded the duo $1 million and a trip to New Orleans to attend the Super Bowl. The Doritos commercial is the first project Bradshaw and Norell co-directed, they told Ad Age. The two first met a few years ago while working as directors and producers for content creator Zach King, whose video illusions have landed him more than 168 million followers across social media. A year ago, they quit together to “pursue [their] own dreams of directing and storytelling, whether it’s through commercials or short films,” Bradshaw said. Bradshaw didn’t find out about the Doritos competition until less than a month before its Nov. 21 submission deadline, he said. The majority of the ads they had previously made for brands including CeraVe, Credit Karma, Adobe and Mattel had timelines of at least three months, the duo said, along with multiple rounds of approvals. Super Bowl commercials Tracking the latest brand and agency plans Click here When he pitched the idea of working on a commercial to Norell, Norell didn’t realize Doritos had revived its “Crash the Super Bowl” contest after a nine-year hiatus, he said. The competition, which initially ran from 2006 to 2016, was “the reason why [Norell] started watching the Super Bowl” as a child, he said. “That was always the ad I’d wait for—the Doritos ad.” Doritos brought back “Crash the Super Bowl” to commemorate the brand’s 25th year running an ad during the Big Game, Tina Mahal, senior VP of marketing at PepsiCo Foods North America (the parent company of Doritos), said during the Ad Age Super Bowl Playbook event this week. While most elements of the contest are identical to when it debuted in 2006, “the new aspect of the campaign was anyone can be a creator now,” she said. “The social media landscape has changed so much from when we first did this that we expected people to engage in really interesting ways,” Mahal said. “And honestly, that was the big difference, the type of creators … Anyone with a phone and a camera in their hand can be a creator.” Below, more from Mahal about the ad and Bradshaw and Norell Once Bradshaw and Norell agreed to enter the contest together, they swiftly got to work by pouring over “literally every Doritos ad on the internet—the good and the bad—just to kind of dial in on what Doritos would really want” from a commercial, Bradshaw said. “We wanted to really push the boundaries of the storytelling, of the comedy, because the campaign is literally called ‘For the Bold,’” he said, referring to Doritos’ “For the Bold” brand platform. Bradshaw and Norell initially brainstormed about 50 potential ad ideas before trimming that list to three concepts, including the alien-themed idea they ultimately selected. One of the other concepts in their top three similarly involved a tug-of-war for a bag of Doritos, but featuring a fisherman rather than a UFO enthusiast, Norell noted. After spending a week and a half developing the idea for the commercial, Bradshaw and Norell had just two weeks to film and edit the entire project, they said. On Nov. 9, the duo and their production crew pulled an all-nighter at a cabin in the California mountains to film the entire commercial, Bradshaw said. “It was a night shoot, from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., and it was wild,” he said. We were up in the woods, in the mountains. There were animals everywhere and it was cold. We were in the thick of it, quite literally.” Bradshaw and Norell assembled a small visual effects team—including their friend Jace Hardwick, founder and CEO of video production company Action Studios—to create the moments of physical comedy in the ad, such as the alien’s spacecraft exploding and the UFO enthusiast being wildly flung around by its tractor beam, Norell said. He and Bradshaw were unsure if Hardwick and his team would be able to pull off so many complex visual effects in such a short timeframe, but Hardwick assured them it wouldn’t only be possible to do so, but “easy,” Bradshaw said. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jace Hardwick (@jacehardwick) Bradshaw and Norell ultimately submitted the ad just 90 minutes before the window closed, after spending another all-nighter making the finishing touches, Bradshaw said. But sending their commercial to Doritos was only the first step toward winning the “Crash the Super Bowl” contest. The two spent most of January rallying the vote on social media by making between two and four social posts daily, sharing behind-the-scenes footage from the production of the ad (such as the above video of Hardwick demonstrating how the VFX team created the UFO explosion) and reminding viewers to support their commercial in the competition, they said. The duo also called up Kevin T. Willson, a two-time winner of the “Crash the Super Bowl” contest and alumnus of the same college Norell attended (Biola University), to seek out advice and “figure out what the best plan of attack was” to promote their commercial, Bradshaw said. On that front, Norell having a built-in TikTok audience of 6.2 million followers certainly helped. But they also sent daily reminders to vote for the ad across a plethora of group chats composed of family, friends and fellow creators, Bradshaw said. @natenorell HELP ME WIN A MILLI BEFORE TIKTOK GETBANNED 😭🙏🏼 Go vote for ABDUCTION at DoritosCrash.com or click the link in my bio! You can vote once a day until Jan 28th! WOULD MEAN THE WORLD 🙏🏼 #doritos #doritoscrash #superbowl ♬ original sound - Nate Norell Their sleepless nights and extensive social media push eventually paid off. While the duo declined to share how much it cost them to produce the self-funded Doritos ad, Norell indicated that the total cost was far less than the $1 million prize money they received. “Honestly, I wish more brands did contests like this,” Bradshaw said. “This contest is such a cool opportunity to allow filmmakers who don’t have massive production companies or massive followings or crazy connections to showcase their work and allow their work to speak for itself … Sure, we’ve both worked with a lot of cool brands and celebrities and stuff, but a Super Bowl ad is truly next level. A lot of people spend their entire careers trying to accomplish that and fail. So, for us to get this opportunity, it’s just incredible.”

How the Doritos fan-made Super Bowl ad won the competition after just 3 weeks of production

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