Doritos Super Bowl commercial stars Backstreet Boys, Chance the Rapper

For their annual Super Bowl commercial to highlight their new hot Nacho Cheese Doritos, the company went big. How big? They basically are pairing together two generations of music stars in the Backstreet Boys and Chance the Rapper.

The premise – Doritos has now taken the original Nacho Cheese-flavored chip and now made it hot — which is basically a combination of the Flamin’ Hot label that they’ve used for other flavors of various Frito-Lay chips/snacks over time. They decide to draw a parallel between this and Chance the Rapper being added as a featured performer to the Backstreet Boys, who are singing their classic “I Want It That Way.” It’s a weird sort of mash-up that musically, actually kind of works.

Does it work? – The weird implication of this commercial is that the Backstreet Boys are somehow not hot when you’re talking about arguably one of the biggest boy bands of all time. Sure, they weren’t beloved by everyone but clearly, they were super-popular in their era and still sell out venues all over the world. (Of course, another way to spin this is that like Nacho Cheese Doritos, the Backstreet Boys are beloved already by a generation.)

One of the other things that we wonder about with this ad in general is just whether or not a Flamin’ Hot Nacho Cheese Dorito is really necessary, given that Doritos has been selling Spicy Nacho chips for a long time and those are actually our favorite of their various flavors. Maybe this is just a hotter version of that? Anyhow, the entire messaging of the commercial is a little bit weird, but it’s going to get people talking and that’s one more or less the point of it. We don’t think that they were worried too much as to whether or not someone was going to really analyze what it’s trying to say.

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