cheetos super bowl commercial – Syndication Server

The 2022 Super Bowl commercials were full of A-list celebrities, from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Selma Hayek to Jason Sudeikis, Eugene Levy, Dolly Parton, and Ana Kendrick.

Adding such star power to the production isn’t a new concept, of course, but the amount of top billing that hit the small screen during Super Bowl 56 surpassed any in recent years. And the flux made perfect sense. Hearing each of those names above warrants a massive attention-grab from audiences, so the pull they can bring to a 30-second snippet of time is justifiable.

But what happens when the celeb is a recognizable face…that happens to be unrecognizable?

More to the point: when it’s just the talent’s voice being used for an animated element?

That was the challenge Frito-Lay faced with its debut release of a standalone for Doritos and Cheetos Flamin’ Hot.

The national commercial starred Megan Thee Stallion and Charlie Puth, two trending artists in the pop culture ecosystem—an intelligent move for a big game campaign where “music plays a key role in Frito-Lay’s marketing approach.”

However, the commercial wasn’t a grand feature of either performer hopping on the mic like a mini-halftime concert.

Well, sort of.

Instead, it was an Avatar-like display of animals—two of which were Megan Thee Stallion and Charlie Puth—suddenly convening in a clever beatboxing session to Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It.”

Like the marketing “fame” argument some have about the NFL—where the stars are masked and in helmets, so the public notoriety takes more time than, say, the NBA—having two massive stars in the form of a beatboxing Fox (Puth) and sassy songbird (Stallion) would take time… time that brands do not have in such circumstances.

Again, that was the challenge. And Frito-Lay’s creative solved it, much in the way a major motion picture would—teasers.

All the rage, this year’s big game advertisers teased and tempted the audience well before the game in record numbers. And while most were great, few hit the exact element needed to deliver on the actual spot like Frito-Lay did with its Flamin’ Hot releases.

Why? For the same reason that when I can say Rocket from “Guardians of the Galaxy” you think of Bradley Cooper.

The brand introduced both stars pre-animation, which meant that when the time came—yep, you guessed it—the audience had the image of the A-Listers in their minds.

This YouTuber’s comment drove home the point: “When you’re a Charlie Puth fan and you find yourself searching for an ad and watching it multiple times.”

And for those who were oblivious to or simply didn’t care that it was Charlie Puth and Megan Thee Stallion?

When you factor in what unfolded—a bunch of musically inclined animals, a la Budweiser Frogs—there’s a pretty good chance there’s another area in the Super Bowl commercial cosmos that would consider that … justifiable.

Teaser No. 1