The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2022
Doritos turned its bags into tickets for a concert inside Stranger Things' Upside Down
To launch Stranger Things season 4, Doritos staged the '80s festival that never happened — Live From the Upside Down — with bags of Doritos as the ticket in.
Doritos · Netflix
What it had to solve
Stranger Things season 4, set in 1986, was about to premiere and Doritos wanted a role in that conversation. The brand built a fictional backstory: the tour bus headed for its 1986 Doritos Music Fest crashed near Hawkins, Indiana, and the bands vanished into the Upside Down before ever playing.
How it works
When Stranger Things season 4 — set in 1986 — was about to premiere, Doritos wanted a place in the conversation. It built one out of fiction: the tour bus headed for its 1986 Doritos Music Fest crashed near Hawkins, Indiana, and the bands vanished into the Upside Down before the festival could happen.
Doritos then revived the lost festival as Live From the Upside Down, described as the greatest concert that never happened. Staged as a virtual concert inside the show's parallel world, it mixed '80s acts such as The Go-Go's, Soft Cell and Corey Hart with modern guest Charli XCX, and fans entered through Doritos bags turned into tickets.
The campaign's archive entry records that it drove sales and increased market share while contributing to the most significant Stranger Things season yet. The work was filed in the D&AD awards archive under entertainment as a documented example of a brand building its own event inside a show's mythology.
Why it lands
- Setting the event inside the show's canon gives fans a reason to engage that a conventional ad break cannot offer.
- Making the product itself the ticket turns every purchase into entry to an experience rather than a price paid.
- The 1986 festival fiction aligns the brand with the season's nostalgic era instead of fighting its period setting.
- Billing the event as a lost concert creates a story fans can discover and share before the show even premieres.
What it did
According to the work's archive entry, the campaign drove sales and increased market share while contributing to the most significant Stranger Things season yet; the work was filed in the D&AD awards archive under entertainment.
What you can take
A fictional event can still be a real one: giving a promotion a lost backstory inside a show's canon turns a product tie-in into something fans want to discover, talk about and attend.
Since then
Live From the Upside Down ran around the June 2022 arrival of Stranger Things season 4, announced that May with the full backstory of the lost 1986 festival. The work entered the D&AD awards archive under entertainment, where the entry itself records the sales and market-share effect, and stands as a template for brands building promotional events from a show's own mythology.
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