Ramalytics

As a brand, if you truly want to connect with your fans, sometimes it helps to break the bonds of ‘traditional’ in advertising to truly reach them. Take our Doritos fans, for instance. Our core audience plays on the bleeding edge of mobile technology, and to get in front of them, we need to meet them on their level instead of expecting them to come to ours.

Driving engagement for Doritos Roulette presented us with an interesting challenge. This represented one of the most unique product experiences ever: in each handful of nacho cheese chips, one was extremely spicy, despite looking identical to all others.

The product was one-of-a-kind and too novel to promote via the usual means. It didn’t even feature any promotional messaging. The standard framework just wouldn’t work this time. We decided that Twitter was the only appropriate path for this launch scenario.

With that in mind, we created #DoritosRoulette, an online game which seamlessly addressed four objectives central to this product:

1) Authenticity: You take a chance every time you grab a Roulette chip; that same product experience had to come across in the program. Similarly, with #DoritosRoulette you could win or get burned with every turn.

2) Engagement: We created an interface where fans could choose their own prizes and tag their friends—the burn prize remained a secret until the tweet was sent. Here are some of the user interface designs, in case you missed it:

3) Awareness: Word of mouth is always your best friend. For Roulette, we leveraged this by letting players tag three friends, who could in turn tag three more and increase their chances. Pay it forward with boldness, fans pay it back with attention.

4) Digital-Only: Daily drawings on Twitter engaged thousands of consumers and generated millions of impressions. One day, we brought live action to #DoritosRouletteLive with Periscope, giving fans the chance to ‘win or get burned’ by the roulette wheel in real time.

#DoritosRoulette was the single most successful limited-time-only promotion Doritos has ever done. The graphic along the side provides a snapshot of the program and really illustrates how adapting to your consumer can instantaneously transform the face of a product.