Doritos Flamin' Hot Brings the Heat to Super Bowl LVI
Doritos' Flamin' Hot 'Push It' campaign is a multi-phase Super Bowl LVI teaser and commercial series released in the United States between January 7 and February 13, 2022, featuring Megan Thee Stallion and Charlie Puth performing an animated reimagining of Salt-N-Pepa's 1986 hit 'Push It' to launch a unified Flamin' Hot brand platform across both Doritos and Cheetos.
The campaign opened on January 7, 2022, with a deliberately cryptic teaser showing only an unidentified celebrity's hand — a tactic designed to ignite online speculation and drive organic conversation ahead of Super Bowl LVI. Megan Thee Stallion was revealed as the campaign lead on January 19, 2022, per reporting by Elite Daily, followed by the disclosure of Charlie Puth's involvement in teaser activity released January 24, 2022, also documented by Elite Daily. The full sixty-second commercial then arrived online on February 1, 2022, before airing nationally during Super Bowl LVI on February 13, 2022, as reported by The Drum.
In the United States, this marked the first Super Bowl commercial to unite Doritos and Cheetos under a single Flamin' Hot brand identity, as noted by The Drum. Created by agency Goodby Silverstein and Partners for Frito-Lay, PepsiCo's snack division, the spot cast Megan Thee Stallion as an animated fiery songbird and Charlie Puth as an animated beatboxing fox, per the PepsiCo Newsroom. The 'trailer' format of Teaser Two specifically mimicked cinematic preview conventions — a deliberate structural choice that aligned snack advertising with the entertainment content formats most familiar to the campaign's target audience of young, digitally active consumers across the US market. Clapboard Score for this campaign: 68/100.
Doritos pursued a strategy of cultural convergence rather than straightforward product promotion. The Flamin' Hot flavor line carries established equity as a marker of bold taste preference among younger, diverse American consumers, and the 2022 campaign was engineered to amplify that identity by embedding the brand inside two of the most powerful attention economies available: Super Bowl advertising and celebrity fandom.
The 'trailer' teaser format itself reflects a shift in how snack brands compete for pre-game mindshare in the United States. By releasing sequenced content across several weeks — from the anonymous hand on January 7 to the full reveal on February 1, as documented by The Drum — Doritos extended the campaign's effective media window well beyond a single game-day placement. This mirrors entertainment industry drip-reveal strategies and exploits the social media behavior of younger audiences who actively participate in speculation and reveal moments rather than passively receiving advertisements.
The savory snacks category is a densely contested space in the US market. Doritos competes directly with category stablemates Cheetos and Ruffles — both also owned by PepsiCo's Frito-Lay division — as well as with Pringles, now part of Kellanova. The decision to co-brand the 2022 Super Bowl spot across Doritos and Cheetos under the shared Flamin' Hot umbrella was strategically notable: rather than cannibalizing attention between sibling brands, Frito-Lay concentrated media investment to reinforce platform-level equity. According to Grand View Research, the global savory snacks market reached significant scale in 2022, reflecting sustained consumer appetite for differentiated flavor experiences of the kind the Flamin' Hot line represents. The choice of Megan Thee Stallion, whose fanbase skews young and culturally engaged, directly addressed the demographic segment most likely to trial adventurous flavor variants in the United States.
Director Tom Kuntz helmed the Flamin' Hot 'Push It' commercial, bringing a background in high-production television advertising to a spot that required the seamless integration of live-action celebrity performance with animated character work. The campaign was created by Goodby Silverstein and Partners, as confirmed by Ad Age, and represents one of the agency's most visible Frito-Lay productions to date.
The creative foundation rests on a deliberate act of cultural homage. Megan Thee Stallion and Charlie Puth perform a reinterpretation of Salt-N-Pepa's 1986 hip-hop landmark 'Push It' — a song with four decades of American pop-cultural resonance — reconfigured to match the Flamin' Hot brand's heat-forward personality. Megan Thee Stallion stated through the PepsiCo Newsroom on February 1, 2022: 'Filming this Super Bowl spot and paying homage to Salt-N-Pepa was an incredible experience and I can't wait for my Hotties to check it out.' The choice of a female hip-hop classic carries deliberate intent: it connects the Flamin' Hot identity to a lineage of bold, assertive cultural expression while speaking directly to Megan Thee Stallion's own artistic positioning.
The animated character conceit — Megan Thee Stallion voiced as a fiery songbird and Charlie Puth as a beatboxing fox, per the PepsiCo Newsroom — allowed the creative team to sustain a heightened, fantastical register that would have been difficult to achieve through purely live-action means. The Teaser Two 'Trailer' asset specifically employs cinematic grammar: dramatic pacing, motion graphics, and a withholding-reveal structure consistent with theatrical film trailers. According to Forbes, the campaign's sequenced release architecture built measurable anticipation ahead of the full commercial's online debut. This staged rollout transformed a single Super Bowl buy into an extended content campaign across the US market.
The Flamin' Hot 'Push It' campaign generated documented engagement across its teaser and commercial assets. The second teaser alone — the 'Trailer' Super Bowl LVI Teaser Two — recorded over 456,000 views and more than 3,000 likes on its primary platform distribution, per Clapboard's own campaign data. Those figures reflect teaser-phase performance prior to the full commercial's release and Super Bowl LVI airdate, and represent meaningful pre-game audience capture in the United States for a single video asset.
The completed sixty-second 'Push It' commercial received competitive recognition in the post-game environment. USA Today's thirty-fourth annual Ad Meter, one of the most widely cited consumer-voted rankings of Super Bowl advertising in the United States, placed the spot within its ranked results, per Live 5 News — indicating meaningful consumer approval relative to the full field of Super Bowl LVI advertisers. According to System 1 Group, which independently scores Super Bowl commercials on emotional response and long-term brand-building potential, the campaign demonstrated strong performance characteristics consistent with ads that use musical nostalgia and character-driven storytelling.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness derives from three compounding mechanisms. First, the serialised teaser rollout multiplied the brand's earned media presence across a six-week window in the US market without proportional additional media spend. Second, the co-branding of Doritos and Cheetos under the Flamin' Hot platform concentrated Frito-Lay's Super Bowl investment around a single flavour equity rather than dividing it. Third, the Salt-N-Pepa source material provided instant cultural recognition that reduced the cognitive load required to engage with the brand's positioning. Clapboard Score: 68/100.
Megan Thee Stallion and Charlie Puth starred in the Doritos Flamin' Hot Super Bowl LVI commercial. Megan Thee Stallion voiced an animated fiery songbird and Charlie Puth voiced an animated beatboxing fox, performing a reimagined version of Salt-N-Pepa's 1986 hit 'Push It,' as confirmed by the PepsiCo Newsroom on February 1, 2022.
The Flamin' Hot 'Trailer' Super Bowl LVI Teaser Two was the second in a sequence of pre-game reveals for Doritos' 2022 Super Bowl campaign. Released in January 2022 in the United States, it used cinematic trailer conventions to build anticipation for the full 'Push It' commercial, which aired nationally during Super Bowl LVI on February 13, 2022, per The Drum.
Goodby Silverstein and Partners created the Doritos Flamin' Hot 'Push It' Super Bowl LVI campaign for Frito-Lay, PepsiCo's snack division, as confirmed by Ad Age. Director Tom Kuntz helmed the production. The campaign marked the first Super Bowl commercial to unite Doritos and Cheetos under a single shared Flamin' Hot brand platform, according to reporting by The Drum.
Doritos released the first Flamin' Hot Super Bowl LVI teaser on January 7, 2022, showing only an unidentified celebrity's hand. Megan Thee Stallion was revealed as campaign lead on January 19, Charlie Puth followed on January 24, and the full sixty-second commercial launched online February 1, 2022, before airing during Super Bowl LVI on February 13, as reported by Elite Daily and The Drum.
Megan Thee Stallion and Charlie Puth performed a reimagined version of Salt-N-Pepa's 1986 hip-hop classic 'Push It' in the Doritos Flamin' Hot Super Bowl LVI commercial. Megan Thee Stallion described filming the spot and paying homage to Salt-N-Pepa as 'an incredible experience,' according to a statement published by the PepsiCo Newsroom on February 1, 2022.
The Doritos Flamin' Hot Super Bowl LVI 'Trailer' Teaser Two recorded over 456,000 views and more than 3,000 likes on primary distribution, per Clapboard campaign data. The completed 'Push It' commercial appeared in USA Today's thirty-fourth annual Ad Meter rankings, one of the most widely cited consumer-voted Super Bowl advertising scorecards in the United States, per Live 5 News.
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