UNC-W grad wins Doritos’ Super Bowl ad contest. Here’s how to see the commercial now
A UNC-Wilmington grad won the 2025 “Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Contest,” earning a $1 million prize and a 30-second spot during one of the most-watched TV events of the year.
Dylan Bradshaw, a 2019 film studies graduate who works in the industry in Los Angeles, won the contest with “Abduction.” It’s essentially a tiny movie about an extraterrestrial’s attempt to snag a bag of nacho cheese chips from a ufologist who’s dozed off at his computer.
Bradshaw made the ad with his best friend and co-director, Nate Norell.
Bradshaw, 27, is a native of Columbus, Ohio. A press release from UNC Wilmington said that since moving to L.A. in 2020, Bradshaw has worked with celebrities including Tom Brady, Terry Crews and Charli D’Amelio, and worked on promotions for CeraVe and Credit Karma.
Bradshaw has a passion for storytelling, the release said, inspired by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
UNCW said Bradshaw credits the school’s film studies program “for giving me the confidence to go after my dreams — I wouldn’t be here without them!”
Some 2,000 entries were submitted to the contest, and three finalists were put on the Doritos website where fans chose “Abduction” as the winner. This was the first time Doritos had held the contest since the 2016 Super Bowl.
In 2010, a Cary man, Josh Svoboda, won $600,000 when he came in second place in USA Today’s Super Bowl Ad Meter contest, for a Doritos commercial called “Underdog.” Svoboda told Ad Age that he spent $200 making the ad.
Bradshaw’s snack-snatching alien will bring intelligent life to Super Bowl LIX’s first quarter on Sunday, when more than 1 million viewers are expected to be tuned in, some of them as much for the ads as the athletics.
If you need to know now who gets the chips in the end, watch the commercial at doritoscrash.com.
