Tag Archives: Doritos

Best-Selling Mystery Novelist: Cheetos Fuels My Creativity!

Brand Loyalty, Our Favorites | by
    Novelist Janet Evanovich is an avid brand enthusiast for Cheetos.

    There's no mystery when it comes to what snack keeps novelist Janet Evanovich going.

    Here’s the kind of advertising that brands simply cannot buy.

    Best-selling mystery author Janet Evanovich, who recently released her 18th novel featuring bounty hunter Stephanie Plum, loves to coat her typing fingers with orange cheese dust.

    And not just any cheese dust mind you—Cheetos cheese dust.

    She makes the revelation in the latest issue of Hemispheres Magazine, the official inflight publication of United Airlines.

    Evanovich’s heroine, who is played by Katherine Heigl in the new movie “One for the Money,” is a tough Jersey lingerie saleswoman who turns to tracking down fugitives after losing her job. It’s safe to say that very few bounty hunters ever pull off the opposite career move.

    Here’s a snippet:

    “Before Stephanie can even step foot off Flight 127 from Hawaii to Newark, she’s knee deep in trouble. Her dream vacation turned into a nightmare, she’s flying back to New Jersey solo, and Sasquatch is snoring in row 22. Worse still, her seatmate never returned to the plane after the L.A. layover. Now he’s dead, in a garbage can, waiting for curbside pickup. His killer could be anyone. The FBI, the fake FBI, and guns-for-hire are all looking for a photograph the dead man was supposed to be carrying…”

    Evanovich tells Hemispheres contributor David Carr, the media and culture critic for The New York Times, that Cheetos provide the “magic dust” that keep her creative juices flowing.

    “It’s that orange color that you can’t get out. I get it under my fingernails and it’s gummed up in my computer keyboard. It’s really vicious stuff, but when I can’t get an idea, you give me a bag of Cheetos and I’m flying.”

    For his part, Carr writes in his one-line bio that he’ll “take Fritos and Mountain Dew over brie and chardonnay any day.”

    Frito-Lay and Mountain Dew have gravitated toward marketing to extreme sports and adventurers — such as one of our favorite Pongr players who recently brought his Dew and Doritos on a parachute jump.  But given the unsolicited and enthusiastic endorsements from a couple of literary giants, maybe it’s also time to court the bookworm crowd?

    (Have any favorite pics of yourself, family or friends smiling with some “magic” snack dust?  Share ‘em at Cheetos@Pongr.com or Doritos@Pongr.com)

    Soaring Brands: Skydiving with Doritos and Dew

    Brand Ambassadors, Brand Loyalty, Our Favorites, Pongr Contests | by
      Matt is a brand enthusiast for Mountain Dew and Doritos both on the ground and in the air.

      So this is what they eat in the heavens?

      The sky’s the limit for Matt’s daring snack experiments!

      The 25-year-old vagabond skydiving coach from Indiana, Ohio and Florida (he goes where the seasonal work is) was excited to hear about about Pepsi and Frito-Lay’s “Ultimate Match-Up” contest to win a trip to see the New York Giants battle the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI.

      His friend had seen the Pongr-fueled promotion on a bag of Doritos:  Take a photo of any Pepsi product matched up with any Frito-Lay product, text/email/upload the pic to PepsiCo, and be randomly chosen to win a slew of prizes, including “Ultimate Access” for two at this year’s Super Bowl in Indianapolis, 2012 game tickets for your favorite NFL team, a year’s supply of soda and snacks in a souvenir Pepsi/NFL fridge, Xbox 360 game consoles and NFL merchandise.

      Even though the contest only required pics of the brand logos together, Matt wanted to bring his game to the next level.

      Tapping into his passion of parachuting, he decided he wanted to explore some of life’s unanswered mysteries:

      1. What does Mountain Dew taste like at 10,000 feet?

      2. Can one Dorito, carefully placed between your teeth, withstand the stress test of a free fall?

      3. How many Doritos can you catch in your mouth while they are being whisked away by powerful gusts of wind?

      4. How does it feel to make Doritos fall from the sky like snowflakes?

      You can't put a price on this kind of brand loyalty.

      Snacks in the Cessna: The anticipation builds for playing Pongr with parachutes!

      “I figured I got the whole country to compete with. I had better get creative,” says Matt, who photographed his snack-themed jump with the help of a GoPro Hero 2 camera attached to his sneaker. “I love the pictures of the chips flying in my face. Some bird, somewhere, was eating well that day!”

      Once you've enjoyed Doritos mid-air, you can bet you'll never buy another brand of chips again.

      Think it's easy to catch free-falling Doritos in your mouth? YOU try it!

      Matt makes his living by packing parachutes, one of those jobs where the anti-drowsiness formula of Mountain Dew is most helpful.  He personally jumps between 100 and 250 times a year, though this is first experience skydiving with products.

      “One of the things I really wanted to see was if a single Dorito could handle the wind in my face. It didn’t break!”

      Asked if his experiment has any practical applications, such as trying to use the chips as wind-resistant shingles on a home, Matt shrugged: “I wouldn’t go that far.”

      Doritos wins for strongest chip brand.

      Durable Doritos: The wind has finally met its match.

      A devoted Dew drinker “for as long as I can remember,” Matt says his favorite beverage tastes no different while he’s floating in the wind than it does on the ground. Gravity is gravity and the mechanics involved from getting liquid from one’s mouth to stomach remains the same.  He does imagine, however, that drinking Dew during a straight free fall would be far more complicated.

      “It’s certainly possible,” he says. “The wind likes to shake everything up and at that speed, everything becomes a rudder. Everything moves harder, faster. But I would definitely try it.”

      Speaking of shaking, everyone knows what happens when you shake a bottle of soda. To ensure that he could actually enjoy the Dew without it spraying all over the place, Matt wisely pre-opened his bottle before takeoff. Ditto for opening up the Doritos so the bag didn’t pop from the altitude.

      Cool, crisp Mountain Dew in the cool, crisp stratosphere.

      Ahhhhhhhhhh!

      The skydiving coach has been in the sport for two and a half years and calls it a “lifestyle” more than a hobby or job.

      “When I first tried this, it was all about the adrenaline rush. Now I want to figure out how to fly my body, control the angles and adjust my fall rate as I speed toward earth,” he says. “No matter how hard I work at it, I know I could never be an NBA superstar. But in this sport, there’s no limit to what you can achieve if you’re dedicated. Skydiving is accessible to everyone.”

      As is the pastime of Pongr, which Matt only found out about through the Pepsi and Frito-Lay promotion.  Other brands he feels equally passionate about are Nike (which can’t be seen in the skydiving pictures because his sneaks held the camera) and Apple.

      “I’m very loyal to Apple. I believe that they go above and beyond the competition with pretty much everything they do. They are constantly thinking how they can make things better and that’s the skydiving mindset, too,” he says. “What do we know right now?  What can we learn? How can we improve on it?”

      Now that he’s been introduced to Pongr, Matt says he plans on dreaming up other wild stunts taking his favorite brands (and earned Pongr Bucks) to new heights!

      See how Matt turned his Nike sneakers into an airborne photo studio.