See the Finalist's Commercials in Doritos' Super Bowl Ad Contest with $1 Million Prize

Frito-Lay, the Plano-based division of PepsiCo is paying an estimated $8 million to air two commercials during Fox’s telecast of the Super Bowl: the fan favorite and another chosen by the Doritos marketing team.

The finalists spent between $300 and $7,000 creating their ads. The top choice of the fans will walk away with a million bucks, while the marketing team’s choice will take home $50,000. Both will get to work on the set of Marvel’s The Avengers: Age of Ultron.

All five ads will become part of Doritos’ ad campaign for the rest of the year.

The contest has gone from a risky gamble to a Super Bowl mainstay.

The first contest drew more than 1,000 entries. The winner spent $12.79 for his spot, which ranked No. 4 in viewer popularity on USA Today’s Ad Meter.

Two contests later, the Crash winner was the most popular ad during the game, dethroning Budweiser, which had been king of the Ad Meter for a decade. Crash winners have repeated that No. 1 feat three times.

Frito-Lay isn’t using Ad Meter this year. It opened Crash to all 45 foreign markets where Doritos are sold, and Ad Meter focuses on U.S. consumer responses.

This year’s winner is guaranteed a million-dollar payday.

That drew more than 5,000 entries, down about 1,000 from the peak year of 2012 but up from 3,000 last year, which is an indication that the contest hasn’t grown stale.

The five finalists were chosen by 15 screeners, including bigwigs from Frito-Lay, partner agencies and Marvel’s Stan Lee.

There was one international finalist, a guy from Australia who is generating Internet buzz with his “Finger Cleaner” entry.

“One of the age-old issues about Doritos is: ‘It gets my fingers messy. How do I clean my fingers?’” Mukherjee says. “This particular consumer found a very interesting way to solve that problem.”

“Breakroom Ostrich” has animal zaniness that’s a little like Geico’s camel and Hump Day. The ad cost $800 to produce, most of that for shooting footage of the large birds strutting around an ostrich farm.

You have until midnight next Wednesday to watch the finalists and vote for your favorite at Doritos.com. So far, the Doritos site has drawn 3.7 million unique visitors and 25 million views.

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