Going out with a bang

Last weekend, Ten years after it first brought consumer-generated content to center stage, Doritos hosted its final Crash the Super Bowl, a program that in many respects shaped the brand in the eyes of consumers. How do you say goodbye to a decade-long program that was responsible for consistently producing some of the best content to come out of the biggest day of the year for advertising? You break world records and leave your name burned into the sky.
 
Although this program is near and dear to my heart, I’ll try not to get lost in the reminiscing about the details and instead just cover a few of my favorite activations.
 
First, Skymoji – a stunt so simple yet so effective that I’m amazed we’ve never done it before. I especially loved the Illuminati chatter on Twitter – rumors that I will neither confirm nor deny.

Second, I loved our war room and in-stadium activation. We redefined real-time marketing by being the only brand to establish a mobile war room for creating content from inside the Super Bowl itself. The team, armed with only phones and iPad minis, created gifs, pics and posts on the fly using fans in the stands, because after all, and what is Crash without our fans? They also managed to literally break Periscope by overloading their server during their halftime livestream. Talk about crashing!
 
Tied to our war room activities was our Crash the Second Screen challenge, which gave fans a chance to earn glory, Doritos and their share of $150K for coming up with the best tweet, pic or video showcasing their love for Doritos. The 5,500 entries were hilarious, the chatter it generated was unbelievable, and our influencers did an amazing job spreading the word and driving entries. 

And last but hardly least; we set three world records to kick off the Bold 50 program including my personal favorite, the Tallest Suspended Football Party. This feat was accomplished with Bold View, an amazing aerial dinner experience overlooking the Super Bowl from 140 feet straight up in the air. I hate heights, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to be a part of that one.

At the end of the day, Doritos came out on top by virtually every single measure. All of these activities came together and sparked conversation about the brand to the tune of 316K tweets, reaching more than 657 million people!  I was floored by the team’s ability to tackle all of these different events and activations without a hitch. Would I have liked to take the top spot on the ad meter? Of course. But even without claiming the coveted number one ranking, I’d be hard-pressed to call our final year of Crash anything but an absolute success.