I don’t know if you’ve ever eaten a Dorito before, but I’ve always thought of them as a sort of inoffensive corn snack that is extremely good at picnics when you need a vehicle for hummus. But apparently this isn’t the case. Instead, according to the new Doritos Roulette advert, eating Doritos is actually akin to being locked in a room by a serial psychopath and forced to dance for your life.
It’s rare that advertisers go down the path of actively saying their product is horrible to eat – imagine a Werther’s Original ad that is just a kid coming home from a park saying: “Mummy, a man who smelled of wee gave me some stale toffees” – but that’s what’s happened here.
We open with our hero, Generic Woman No 1, about to eat a tortilla chip. This is not normally an ordeal, but open your eyes and zoom out: she seems to be on the set of the first Saw film, surrounded by an oversized koala, a rabbit-man, and a mascot that looks as if Tinky Winky has just got out of the harrowing burns unit. Strings soar. The music swells. She eats the chip. The camera then pans to our antihero, Generic Man No 1. He flatly refuses to eat a Dorito and turns instantly into a chicken.
The message here is: one in six of the new Doritos is extremely spicy and bad. If you refuse to eat one you are no longer a viable human person and you are in fact a chicken. Fine. But why the rabbit? Why Tinky Winky? Why the extreme wacky murder vibes? In a word: why? As a food concept, this is bad. As an advert concept, this is baffling. Long story cut short: stick to Cool Original.
