Commercial for Super Bowl gaining views
A bag of Doritos and a day’s work could win USU MBA student Cory Keate and his colleagues $25,000 and a chance to have their own Doritos advertisement aired on national television during the Super Bowl.
Keate, his uncle Dave Kotter, and Ron Adair of the Logan marketing firm Adair Creative Group created a 30-second ad in response to the Doritos and Pepsi Max “Crash the Super Bowl” advertising contest. The contest challenged amateur cinematographers across the nation to create commercials that could potentially represent these two companies during next year’s Super Bowl.
The top five finalists for both Doritos and Pepsi Max will take home $25,000, and those voted into the top three in each category by the public will have airtime during the Super Bowl. There is also a later chance to win $1 million if the top three ads of the Super Bowl, as decided by USA Today, are worthy of being Doritos or Pepsi Max commercials. Adair believes that his group has, at the least, a “good chance of making the top five finalists.”
In their ad, Keate plays the entitled grandson of Kotter and pulls up to his grandfather’s property in his Porsche during the opening scene. Kotter is outside with a woodchipper and asks his grandson for some help. He then pretends that his arm gets caught in the machine so that he can steal Keate’s bag of Doritos.
After only a few weeks online, the crew’s video, titled “The Woodchipper (Alternative),” has received over 27,000 hits on crashthesuperbowl.com, and moved from position 9,205 to 50 in the first day, Adair said.
“The ones ahead of us have been there for at least four weeks,” he said. “They had a three-to-four week lead on us, and we caught right up to them.”
Adair, who attended the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara and has been involved with photography for more than 16 years, wanted to participate in the contest last year. It was a trip to The Pickleville Playhouse that helped him discover Keate, who has worked there for three years, and convince him to help with the ad. Though they were not able to participate last year, Keate said they learned some things to help them make a better attempt this year.
“We started brainstorming. We were doing it mostly for fun. Of course we had that hope that things would work, that our commercial could be Super Bowl material,” Keate said.
Adair said they wanted to try to see how a small-town, local advertisement could fare against the rest of the country. “We didn’t care so much about the prize,” he said.
They decided to focus on a spoiled grandson being tricked by his grandfather. Idea-forming proved easier than actual filming, Keate said.
“Once you start filming, you have an idea that seems so simple, but it turns out being a lot of work. It’s a big challenge to create what you saw in your mind and bring it all together,” he said.
Both Keate and Adair remarked that the whole process of putting the film together was “incredible” and “a happy accident.” Actual filming didn’t occur until the day before their deadline, and acquiring props was what Keate called “a mixture of luck and blessings.”
“We wanted a really nice sports car,” he said. “Come to find out, that’s one of the hardest things to find in Logan.”
The group tried several businesses without success until they met with Jordan Peterson, who is employed at the Murdock Hyundai dealership near Hyde Park.
“We showed him what we wanted for our commercial, but he still didn’t have what we were looking for,” Keate said. “We were about to leave when he said, ‘I have a black convertible Porsche Boxter that you could use. It’s mine and it’s out back. Could that work?’ It was exactly what we were looking for. “
Peterson said he had two reasons for lending them the car.
“I have friends that are into making movies. I didn’t know if they were that type, but I thought it was really cool. And if they would have been doing a school project, I probably wouldn’t have lent it, but since it was something as big as the Super Bowl, I thought it was pretty neat,” he said.
Without the budget to buy a woodchipper, Keate said that they again searched town for something they could use and found one at Northwest Rentals. Again, they were lent one for free.
While the cost of the average Super Bowl commercial can be over $1 million, Keate said his crew only spent $59.
“Half of that was spent filling up gas for the guy who lent us the car,” he said, “and then we bought a v-neck shirt because I needed to look hipper than I am. The rest was for the Doritos.”
Instead of holding auditions for the part of the grandfather, he suggested his uncle.
“He’s never acted a day in his life,” he said. “I said, ‘I’ve got a great uncle with a great look and a great voice, and he has great property that we could use for filming.’ We thought he might not be comfortable acting, but that he may be up for an adventure.”
Keate credits his uncle for being the best part of the ad, even after only a few hours of informal acting lessons. Kotter said, “It was an educational thing for me. I really enjoyed it. The most interesting thing was just learning how these things come together, how they’re done. I’d never done anything like that before.”
On Jan. 3, 2011, the finalists of the contest will be announced, and the public will be able to vote for their favorites until the 30th. The reaction to the ad has already been very positive, said both Keate and Adair, with both strangers and friends voicing their praise.
“It’s fun to see that we’ve done something others will enjoy,” Adair said.
– ari.w.rees@aggiemail.usu.edu