Whenever Devon Ferguson would bring poutine to the lunch table during high school, he’d make sure to sneeze on his dish in full view of his teenage buddies.
It was all a matter of keeping his fries free of friends’ fingers, the Vancouver filmmaker recalls.
The writer-director-actor used that inspiration for a crowd-sourced Doritos commercial shortlisted January 5 to possibly air during Super Bowl XLIX next month.
Ferguson’s commercial, in which he also stars, features a group of friends sneezing into their Doritos bags to avoid sharing chips with the one guy who didn’t bring any.
Instead of seeking out an ad agency to create a memorable Super Bowl commercial, Doritos asked people to submit their own commercials from across the world and then whittled that list down to 10, including Ferguson’s and a submission from Maple Ridge’s Graham Talbot.
Doritos is allowing fans to vote online for their favourite commercial. The winner receives a US$1 million grand prize and a one-year contract to work at Universal Pictures.
“Getting recognition on a national or international platform can really help open more doors,” Ferguson said.
“It is really tough, it’s really competitive. There’s lots of talented people out there. If more people know you exist, it can only help.”
Talbot, who filmed a commercial featuring a boy using a rocket pack to make a pig fly, was a semi-finalist last year.
This year, he and his team looked at successful Super Bowl commercials and Doritos commercials from the past and realized many of them featured either kids or animals, so they incorporated both into their commercial.
“My brother kind of just spitballed the whole idea out of nowhere,” he said.
“We knew we’d feel good if it could hold up against last year’s (winning commercial).”
This is the second year in a row Doritos has crowd-sourced commercials to air during the Super Bowl.
Talbot, who spent $1,200 of his own money producing the commercial, said Doritos’ strategy of soliciting commercials from the public is a good way to get more “out-of-the-box” ideas that aren’t as polished as the stuff coming from ad agencies.
It also has the added benefit of getting recognition for less-established filmmakers, he said.
Even if Talbot and Ferguson do not walk away with the US$1-million grand prize, their top-10 finishes have already secured them at least US$25,000 in prize money.
Talbot said he wants to use whatever earnings he brings in to help reduce the bill on a high-end camera he’s still paying off.
Ferguson said if he wins, he’s hoping the experience at Universal Pictures would help better him as a filmmaker since the grand prize may only allow him to “buy a bachelor (apartment) in downtown Vancouver.”
