Ad Analysis

Picture the inside of an older, very tidy basement within a home with white walls, missing base-boards, and concrete floors. Opera music playing in the background; warehouse lighting with an open ceiling establishes an eerie feel and lights the figure of a man with a bag of groceries. The man is wearing a black, business suit with his hair gelled down, as though just getting off work. As the man enters his humble living quarters he places his grocery bag on the table, only to pull out Doritos and a mouse trap. The young executive then opens the Doritos bag, and very precisely takes a single chip and cuts a corner off. He then places the corner onto the center of the mouse trap and engages the contraption. Next, the clean-cut man positions the mouse trap in front of the stereo-typical mouse hole, similar to what is seen in children’s cartoons, and drags a chair in front of the hole to view the mouse being trapped. After taking a seat with the remaining Doritos bag, the gentleman watches and begins eating the very food used for his trap. Unexpectedly, a man-sized mouse breaks through the old wall where the mouse hole had been and tackles the young man. At this point, the Doritos logo comes on screen and the giant mouse continues to punch the man on the ground until the thirty allotted seconds are up for the commercial. Filled with foolish humor, this concept is the main idea of a Doritos chip commercial that was aired during the 2008 Super Bowl. By just watching the commercial, one sees there is no real content or substance to it; it is like many other obsolete ads. But an analysis of the commercial’s target audience brings enlightenment to the idea of how violence and humor combined can sell a product such as potato chips.

A commercial aired during the Super Bowl has a very general and broad audience, therefore the theme of the commercial needs to be entertaining to more than one group of people. According to Dr. Frans de Waal, a professor at the University of Columbia, America is infatuated with violence and finds an individual getting hurt to be humorous (3-4). This supports the idea of generalization of a commercial to illustrate comedy that appeals to every type of viewer.