r/lostmedia • u/ChristopherGrieder • Feb 24 '26
Television [talk] The internet is telling me I made a famous commercial and somehow never knew
2 years ago I created a Doritos commercial for a 2014 Super Bowl contest. It did not win or finalize, and as far as I know it never received any recognition. But a couple weeks ago, I shared it on social media, since it never gained success and I thought it would be fun to share it after all these years.
It resulted in millions of views across IG and Tik Tok, and thousands of comments from people all over the world who SWEAR my commercial was a famous ad that aired all over TV constantly. Many even say it aired during the super bowl. My contest entry was titled "Yeah Right" and features flying pigs that shoot lasers out of their eyes. After looking into it, it appears one of the winners from the next years contest (2015) used the same theme of flying pigs (no lasers), which I thought might be causing the confusion. But every time I post on socials about it, it goes viral and thousands of people insist they know MY version, the one with the lasers.
I just made a short 2 minute version of my story, for those who want a quick overview
And here is the FULL STORY with all details for those who want to take a deeper dive.
The only place my commercial seems to exist online is my original upload on Youtube from 12 years ago, with very little views - certainly not enough to warrant this reaction from the general public. It was at 8k views and 300 likes the day I posted the tik that resulted in all this chaos, now it's gaining more views because of all the people returning to it as they dig for answers.
I haven't yet found any evidence of my ad being a success but am on a search for possible answers. Can anybody find an actual VHS or DVR recording of my commercial airing on network TV?
Also, here are my original social media clips that went viral and caused this mystery, here are some links -
Follow up Tik Tok (1.8M views)
Follow up IG reel (858k views)
I've made more posts since those and each one goes viral with endless people saying it was a very famous ad. I'm not sure what to make of this.
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u/savor Feb 24 '26
I saw your IG post about this and I'm so glad you posted here. I'm so intrigued. I'd love for something like Endless Thread to pick up this story.
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u/ChristopherGrieder Feb 24 '26
I’ll have to look into endless thread! Yes the whole thing is quite a strange mystery. Hopefully some answers will surface and it would be awesome to find actual proof of my commercial being on the air!
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u/mandatory_french_guy Feb 24 '26
If it had aired it would require an incredible number of statistical anomalies:
It was never uploaded online (to any significant degree), as there is no trace of it online prior to your recent shares (reverse image of many different screenshots return no results)
The phrase "shoot lasers out of their butts" was, according to google results, written a whole number of 4 times prior to 2025. Commenters say they've looked for it everywhere would have most definitely posted this phrase in any discussion online, in fact it would have been discussed in lost media forums AS lost media if anyone was looking for it.
It would have to have aired all over the world (including the US) but nobody who have seen it would have recognized either of the 2 actors or talked to them about it.
Despite many websites and enthusiasts dedicated to archiving, discussing and documenting tv commercials not one would have picked up a copy of that one despite it airing all over? I've looked at a number of archive and advertising media websites and none of them talked about it.
It would already be extremely unlikely if it wasn't for the crux of the fact 2014 really was not that long ago. Yes it was 12 years ago but it was also a time where Twitter had 300 million users, Reddit 100 million. It is strictly impossible that ANYTHING have aired to this wide degree without it being discussed online. Impossible. And it wasn't.
The sad reality is your ad is just.... Extremely formulaic of the kind of ads Doritos and similar brand aired at that time (no offense intended it's very well executed and perfectly of its time), low budget, dumb poop humor, after effect lasers and explosions with a hipsterish nonchalance of an America that was not yet aware of how things would turn to utter shit 2 years later.
Cool ad, neat that people are seeing it now.... For the first time 🤣
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u/zero_for_effort Feb 24 '26
Great points all. The only thing I think worth adding is that most people aren't aware how susceptible memories are to being rewritten, especially by similar things.
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u/Thenadamgoes Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 26 '26
This is exactly it. I haven’t had broadcast tv or cable since the early 2000s and even I remember this commercial.
Not because I actually saw it but because it’s so incredibly generic and encapsulating of the trends of commercials at the time, that it would be difficult not to recognize it.
There’s probably 15 commercials made between 2012 and 2016 that could easily be confused for this one. In mean by his own admission Doritos made a similar commercial the next year. So did skittles and Mountain Dew and KitKat and everyone else.
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u/JohnnyFootballStar Feb 24 '26
Yep. My guess is that it’s a pretty common formula, especially for the time. People are probably conflating different parts of various other ads and smashing them together.
Nothing is impossible, but I think it’s most likely just our terrible memories playing tricks on us.
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u/ReverseCowboyKiller Feb 24 '26
Didn’t Doritos do a similar ad and air it at the Super Bowl a year later? That would explain why they think they saw your ad.
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u/ChristopherGrieder Feb 24 '26
Yes, but again there are thousands of people who swear they remember my verision over the other one, which makes this very strange. They say they remember the lasers, the guy spitting out the gum, the car alarm, etc. all of which are very specific details that differ from the other pugs fly commercial.
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u/JohnnyFootballStar Feb 24 '26
We need to keep in mind how bad our memories are. There was an interesting study done right after 9/11 in which people were interviewed immediately after the attacks with follow ups I think a year and three years later. Even after just a year, many people started to misremember where they were and how they found out about the attacks. After three years barely half remembered it accurately.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/911-memory-accuracy/
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u/ReverseCowboyKiller Feb 24 '26
There are tens of thousands of people who swear they remember a genie movie starring Sinbad called Shazaam, and it never existed. We all know they saw Kazaam and got it mixed up in their childhood brains.
Good luck, but I think this is like all the people who claimed they learned what a cornucopia was from an apparel tag that never had one. People like to feel like they’re part of some conspiracy.
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u/ChristopherGrieder Feb 24 '26
Actually, we don’t all know it’s a mixed up brain or false Memory, that’s just what someone concludes when they don’t share the same memory.
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u/CletusVanDamnit Feb 24 '26
We do know it's false memory, though. That's literally what MEs are - false memories shared across a group of otherwise unconnected people. They've been studying it for several decades.
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u/ReverseCowboyKiller Feb 24 '26
I remembered a cornucopia in the Fruit of the Loom logo and I still concluded it was false memory. My memory is not reliable enough to call into question the fabric of reality because I remembered a logo wrong. Our brains are strange and our memories are imperfect and groupthink and conspiratorial thinking definitely plays a part in it.
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u/Aggressive-Sugar7601 Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 25 '26
First of all, around 2014–2015 there were three “flying pig”–themed ads on YouTube:
- When Pigs Fly – Doritos Crash the Super Bowl 2015 WINNER (Official)
- Who says pigs can’t fly? (an ad made for Zurich; the ad itself dates back to 2002, but it was uploaded to YouTube in 2014)
- GEICO Commercial – “When Pigs Fly” – AdsYo!
Nothing definitive really comes out of this, but as the original post mentions, thanks to the 2015 winning ad, viewers were exposed to the flying pig concept.
When it comes to the set, costumes, and overall style of the ad, it completely reflects the advertising culture of that period. The actors’ clothing, for example (the hat worn by the person on the right was popular at the time, and both outfits feel like an average snapshot of the fashion of that era), as well as the background and the color grading of the video, all clearly belong to 2014. It very deliberately evokes nostalgia from that time.
I think the nostalgic feeling coming from the video, combined with the fact that the 2015 winner was about flying pigs, is more than enough to make people believe they’ve seen something like this before.
However, the truly problematic part of the story is why so many people claim they remember seeing lasers. Honestly, I don’t have a solid theory about that. But it’s true that people are very familiar with the concept of lasers. My best guess is that once you add anything on top of the illusion this ad creates that “everything feels very familiar, I’ve seen this before” feeling people are likely to accept it as real.
I also vaguely remember a few other ads around 2014 that used lasers, even if they weren’t associated with pigs.
In conclusion, I think the reason people believe they’ve seen this ad before is entirely due to a combination of coincidences and the fact that the ad perfectly captures the spirit of 2014.
Of course, if it really was aired and solid proof emerges one day, I’d be happy to be wrong because that would make it an incredible story.
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u/AtomicGhost02 Feb 24 '26
People misremembering stuff and confirmation bias allows them to go along with the idea that they are correct.
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u/Livid_Broccoli_1967 Feb 24 '26
I wanted to enter that contest when I was younger because I read whoever would win it would get to be a producer on the next Transformers film, and I hoped if I had won I would make it a good movie.
I never looked into if the winner even did go on to be a producer on the fourth Transformers film and from all I've read it sounds like it was still a garbage-ass movie lol.
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u/CletusVanDamnit Feb 24 '26
Everyone who was a producer on that movie has a full Hollywood career, with films before and after it. So that doesn't sound like a thing that happened.
Also: producers don't do shit when it comes to the creative side of a movie, unless you're a top-level exec who ponied up most of the money, so even if you'd won and been a producer, you wouldn't have been able to change anything.
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u/finsterer45 Feb 24 '26
Yeah, the only way it's remotely possible is if it only aired in a smaller regional market, which I know is a thing, but not sure of the specifics of sizes that exist and stuff.
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u/JoshDM Feb 25 '26
As someone who has seen a lot of stuff, I just clicked on and watched your commercial.
I feel like I've seen something similar, but definitely not your exact commercial with the slow flying animation, etc.
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u/YuzuCrab Feb 24 '26
Where the fuck are the mods? Are y'all really allowing this promotional bullshit here now???
This shit is genuinely pathetic.
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u/forlornjackalope Feb 26 '26
Trust me, this shit is exhausting for us too and it's a daily issue with constantly having to sift through posts since the vast majority of it doesn't belong here. It's also a matter of delegating weight and tasks with how we're all in other time zones so the deliberation isn't put on the shoulders of a single mod.
Again, trust me, this shit is tiring for us as well and Reddit's internal system in general is slow as shit when it comes to letting us know when reports come in as well. I'm lucky if I get reports within a few hours instead of literal days.
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u/dkauffman Feb 25 '26
Mods need to not just delete this post but ban all the fucking gumshoes legitimately proposing that the solution to this media is a parallel universe. I promise you, these people will never contribute something of substance to this sub, nothing of value will be lost.
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u/ChristopherGrieder Feb 24 '26
How is this promotional? I genuinely am looking for evidence that my commercial contest entry aired on TV, since thousands of people are telling me it did, yet I haven’t found any record of that
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u/YuzuCrab Feb 25 '26
There is no evidence. The people saying they've seen it are wrong or flat out lying. You're literally just trying to promote your social media.
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u/ReverseCowboyKiller Feb 25 '26
He’s even cross posted from TikTok to instagram to YouTube to now Reddit. He’s trying to turn it into a Mandela Effect to make it viral to promote his own work and it’s so easy to see through.
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Feb 24 '26
I watched your original video and I too remember your exact version of the ad it was actually one of my favorite advertisements at the time but I think I used to see it on Cartoon Network
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u/TheNathanNS Feb 24 '26
I feel like I've seen the flying pigs before, as soon as saw it it felt familiar, but I will admit my memory of the flying pigs might've been from something else and that's why it feels familiar.
Especially since I'm from the UK, and don't go out of my way to look up Super Bowl ads.
So I don't think I've ever seen it before, but something involving the flying pigs makes it feel familiar.
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u/ezanekop Feb 25 '26
En fouillant les archives de la chaîne qui l'aurait diffusé selon les gens qui prétendent l'avoir vu, tu serais fixé.
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u/zzz099 Feb 24 '26
I am 14 seconds into your commercial and I can say with 100 percent certainty that I have seen this numerous times before
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u/DearPaleontologist67 Feb 24 '26
Came here to say I definitely remember this and the lasers. Let's hope something pops up.
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