Va. Beach man wins $1M for Super Bowl Doritos ad

The "Today" show, "World News with Diane Sawyer," the Princess Anne High School faculty - everybody wants a piece of Huff the Great Dane and Jonathan Friedman, the local man who won $1 million with his Doritos commercial during the Super Bowl.

"It's exciting, crazy," Friedman said by phone Monday afternoon from Indianapolis, where the game was played. "I haven't gotten any sleep. I'm really tired. I did a ton of interviews this morning. It's just been kind of overwhelming."

The commercial, shown during the second quarter of Sunday's game, was one of two consumer-created ads selected for airing by online voters in the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl contest. Friedman didn't know his spot would air until he was at the game, courtesy of Frito-Lay, the makers of Doritos.

Friedman, of Virginia Beach, won the $1 million prize when his ad received the highest score of any Super Bowl commercial from a panel assembled by the USA Today newspaper. Monday was a whirlwind.

Huff's owners, Betsy and Joe DiJulio of Virginia Beach, were swept up in the craze. Local TV and radio shows called, and Betsy DiJulio said the principal of Princess Anne High School, where she works, came into her classroom on Monday.

"He wanted me to bring Huff to the faculty meeting if it wasn't too much trouble," she said. "I dashed home and got him and came running in with him, and they were just lovely, clapping and cheering and literally embracing him. They wanted their picture made with him."

Parents were arriving for the regional Academic Bowl at the same time, she added. "They were coming in with food," DiJulio said. "Huff was all about the Academic Bowl."

And Friedman was all about the Super Bowl. A graphic designer, he spent $20 shooting the commercial, in which local actor Derek Leonidoff plays a witness to a cat-astrophic crime, and the dog bribes him with Doritos not to tell.

Friedman entered it in the Doritos contest, competing against more than 6,100 other entries. A spokesman for the public relations firm working with Frito-Lay said competitors spent between $20 (Friedman) and $3,000 (the baby-in-the-swing ad, his closest competitor) making the ads.

The cost for making other Super Bowl spots, such as the extravagant Elton John commercial for Pepsi, another member of the Frito-Lay family, was much higher.

"Jonathan Friedman made this commercial for $20 and now he's a millionaire," the spokesman said. "He bought some Doritos and a cat collar. We were saying Elton John doesn't get out of bed for less than maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars a day."

Friedman said he went to an after-game party, then stayed up until 3 a.m. talking to Frito-Lay representatives, and had his first news interview at 5 a.m., with no sleep in between. He appeared on the "Today" show Monday morning, and DiJulio fielded calls from Diane Sawyer's people in the afternoon, who wanted to talk about the 120-pound dog that shares the DiJulios' bed every night.

"I didn't know I'd been sleeping with a celebrity all these years," DiJulio said.

Friedman said he hasn't figured out exactly what to do with his winnings but said he and his brother, Matt, a screenwriter, would like to make a feature film. Leonidoff will share in the windfall to an undisclosed extent. And Huff?

"I think I'm going to get Huff a nice new dog collar and some treats," Friedman said. "It'll probably cost me the entire million, because that dog can eat."

Diane Tennant, 757-446-2478, diane.tennant@pilotonline.com