Friday Feature: Doritos "For The Bold" Polling Ads

The Brief

With an iconic shape, and a range of unforgettable flavours, Doritos, pride themselves on being the boldest player in the chip game. 

To help drive home the boldness of the Doritos brand, Shuttlerock were brought in to create a vivid, eye-catching set of Polling Ads—using interactivity to boost engagement through Instagram Stories. 

In order to build the creative, Shuttlerock were given a horizontal TVC along with a number of packaging shots. With these assets in hand, Shuttlerock’s creative team got to work developing a concept for an engaging Polling Ad that would help Doritos to stand out within the Stories placement, and encourage participation by enabling viewers to vote for their favorite flavor. 

Let’s take a look at the results...

Creative Breakdown

1. Interactive elements are heightened by design

Polling Ads are a simple and easy way of boosting ad engagement through the use of an interactive sticker or frame. However, when approaching Polling Ads, brands will often simply slap a Polling Sticker onto an existing piece of creative. Although this may help you achieve a slight boost in engagement, if you want to use the format to its full potential you need to utilize creative that is designed specifically for a Polling objective. 

As you can see in the Doritos example above, the creative serves to draw attention to the two Polling options, encouraging viewers to participate by voting on their preferred flavor. The key technique used to achieve this is the dissecting of the frame along with the packaging into two competing halves representing two of the flavors.

2. Dynamic motion maintains attention

Along with the effective use of Polling to encourage engagement, the ad also drives and maintains viewer attention through the use of dynamic visual effects and transitions. The ad is in constant motion, it starts with a bang and maintains a high tempo right the way through. 

This dynamism gives the ad a sense of energy that correlates well with the boldness of the Dorito’s branding, whilst—as mentioned above—helping to encourage participation with the Polling sticker by drawing attention towards it.  

3. Visuals are amplified by sound

The best Stories Ads make full use of sound to compliment and amplify its visual elements. Sound is often the forgotten element when it comes to video ads made for social. However, it is important to note that 60% of people watch Stories with sound enabled, meaning there is a huge opportunity to give your ad an edge by impactful sound design. 

You can hear from the Doritos example above that music and sound effects work together with the visuals in an integrated way to enhance the visuals playing out on screen. 

The music reflects the boldness of the Doritos’ brand, it has an intensity that builds, helping to sustain watch time right through until completion. On top of this, sound effects such as the chip crunch are layered on in order to drive home product characteristics.