Doritos lets mobile fans create Super Bowl dance videos with AI app

Brief:

PepsiCo's Doritos brand is letting users of a new app called Sway: Magic Dance create augmented videos based on its Super Bowl commercial showing singer Lil Nas X and actor Sam Elliott in a dance battle over Cool Ranch tortilla chips, according to an announcement shared with Mobile Marketer.
The Doritos commercial ends with the hashtag #CoolRanchDance, a hint that viewers can create their own dance videos to share on social media. Sway users can choose from four dances that Lil Nas X and Elliott perform in the Doritos commercial, per the app's menu.
To create a video in Sway, users must put their smartphones in a steady position and film their moves for 30 seconds. After processing the visual data, the app then transposes the video over the body of a professional dancer using artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Sway can be downloaded for free from Apple's App Store.

Insight:

Doritos is adding another dimension to its Super Bowl campaign by sponsoring dance moves in Sway, a novel AI app that creates deepfake-style videos whose popularity on social media has exploded in the past few months on apps like Snapchat. Sway is separate from the social live video app and the discontinued Microsoft app with the same name. Doritos doesn't mention Sway in its commercial, which will limit the likelihood that people make the connection and be able to find it in app stores. However, showing #CoolRanchDance in the commercial is a clear suggestion to follow the hashtag on social media, which many young people now associate with the millions of user-created dance videos on TikTok.

TikTok has user-friendly tools to create and share music videos and has been downloaded more than 1.65 billion times worldwide, per an estimate by researcher Sensor Tower. In the U.S., 13- to 16-year-olds are as likely to use TikTok as they are Facebook and Twitter, a Morning Consult survey found. As brands like Doritos seek to reach a younger demographic of typically heavy consumers of both snack food and mobile video, TikTok is becoming a more popular advertising platform.

Doritos is among the advertisers that are either extending their Super Bowl campaigns to social media or are running promotional efforts alongside the big game. PepsiCo's Mtn Dew brand is promoting its new sugar-free soda in a multichannel effort than includes a Super Bowl ad and efforts on Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok. Mtn Dew will host the #AsGoodAsTheOG dance challenge on TikTok, sponsor an augmented reality (AR) filter on Snapchat and post content to Instagram Stories. Hyundai this week became the first automotive brand to launch a campaign on TikTok, with a video starring former "Saturday Night Live" cast member Rachel Dratch completing a meme-inspired challenge. Brands like Chipotle, E.l.f. Cosmetics, Kind Snacks, Mucinex, Oreo, Ralph Lauren and Walmart also have created campaigns on TikTok to reach younger mobile users outside of the Super Bowl.

Doritos' promotional efforts aimed at younger audiences in the past year have included sponsoring events with other PepsiCo brands like Mtn Dew. Doritos and Mtn Dew in September sponsored a livestreamed esports tournament for Activision Blizzard's latest version of "Call of Duty," the video game developer's hit franchise. The prior month, Doritos ran a campaign that removed its logo in an effort to reach ad-adverse Gen Zers, and included a Snapchat AR Lens.