2010 Winners & Shortlists

Results and Effectiveness

The entire mystery campaign rolled out on the same day, leading consumers to the site. In one week, over 130,000 visitors generated 35,000 votes, making 3,000 suggestions Social Media conversations resulted in 156 threads about ‘Hot Salsa’, worth $42,000 free media. Doritos' total brand awareness across youth leaped from 60% to 90%, while ‘Hot Salsa’ rocketed from 0% to 55%. This quickly converted into sales, shifting 500 tons and clearing stocks in some parts of Saudi Arabia.

Creative Execution

We started with a teaser campaign and blanketed key areas with 1 million black Doritos packs featuring only a question mark and a url and drove traffic to www.doritosarabia.com , the platform to decide the mystery flavor. Because online was the lead medium, we took-over website polls; ‘decide the mystery flavor’, built buzz through a strong social media strategy around mystery flavor in student groups & forum threads across social sites. We turned leading website homepage (Sports, Music) into Doritos microsites. We collapsed content to represent question mark (?) lead visual of the campaign to drive intrigue and curiosity. We created a regional first where we sponsored End-Call Notification (ECN) alert. We partnered with Mobily (No 2 Telco in Saudi) and sponsored ECN as part of a 24-hour roadblock, reaching out to 5 million people within the TA.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Since its launch in 2007, Doritos has dominated the tortilla chip market with sales of 400 tons per month but the challenge was to grow market share in the category by launching a new flavor. The prime target of the campaign was Saudi youth, who is increasingly digitized and with limited entertainment options, they tend to be more receptive to entertaining advertising. We wanted to leverage this insight by putting the consumer in the middle of the story rather than just advertise to them. The story: Doritos has a great new mystery flavor, you will decide what it will be called.