The Broadcast Advertising class was given the chance to feature a commercial for Super Bowl XLVII through the Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl” contest.
For the contest, the class submitted a 30-second commercial featuring Doritos brand tortilla chips. Doritos provided a tool kit which had logos and music that needed to be included in the commercial.
Assistant professor Steve Shaner assigned the Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl” contest to his broadcast advertising class in order for students to learn how to create a TV commercial from start to finish.
“This is the third year that we have done this project and it has gotten great reviews and great accolades from faculty and students,” Shaner said. “Even the professionals in Little Rock know that we do this contest.”
From there, the eight students in the class assigned each other specific jobs for the commercial and brainstormed together to come up with the concept. Senior Velvet Janelle, whose job was to draw up the story-board for the commercial, was the art director for the project. Janelle said it took everyone in the class to come up with the concept and put everything together.
“We spent a lot of time sharing our ideas to the point that I couldn’t tell you who contributed what,” Janelle said. “It all became a mesh of ideas, which is what an ad agency does.”
The project took half of the fall semester with casting calls being made through Pipeline and coming up with a location to film the commercial. The project manager, senior Hillary Miller, was in charge of keeping the class focused on what the theme would be.
“We had to keep in mind that we had to make it a realistic concept that we were able to execute because we are not a Hollywood special effects studio,” Miller said. “It had to be something that was manageable with our resources, yet could be creative and also use our specific talents.”
The 30-second video features a well-off family hosting a dinner party. The son, played by junior David Goble, is a bit strange and is very protective of his Doritos snacks. A dinner guest arrives at the home of the family and tries to take a bag of Doritos from the snack bar only to be confronted by the son who comes out from underneath the table.
“Everyone always likes that one significant character that they can kind of be creeped out by,” Miller said. “It’s like they are the comedic relief, but like, creepy funny.”
Although the “These Are Mine” commercial, created by the Broadcast Advertising class, did not make the top five finalist spots, the students still left the class with a lot of experience on how to produce a TV commercial.
“We would have done that whole process whether we were entering the Doritos contest or not,” Shaner said. “But I just thought that the Doritos contest is something that gave it some real life and some real buzz.”
Super Bowl XLVII will air on Sunday, Feb. 3 on CBS from New Orleans. The prizes for the five finalists consist of $25,000 and a trip to New Orleans. If the featured commercial were to win first place in the USA TODAY Ad Meter rankings, the Grand Prize Winner would receive a bonus of $1,000,000.
