DORITOS: GURU GIVES 1% OF CHIP SALES
Thanks to Frito Lay and eight university students from Montreal, Canadians have their very own brand new Doritos flavour: Scream Cheese.
The mystery chips first appeared on store shelves in plain white bags emblazoned with big black question marks and a challenge: name the flavour, create a 30-second TV spot to promote it and win a one-time $25,000 cash prize plus 1% of the product’s net sales from here to eternity.
‘When we first started this I thought the biggest motivator would be fame, simple as that: you would get your name out there and get your ad on TV,’ says Ian MacKellar, ECD at BBDO Toronto, which collaborated with digital agency Proximity Canada, media agency OMD and promotional agency Capital C, all of Toronto, on the Guru project – the first of its kind in Canada. ‘The $25,000 was a nice incentive, but I think people really got excited that, forever, they will own a piece of this brand – and get paid for it.’
The contest was teased with a TV spot developed by BBDO, ‘Talking Toys,’ during the Super Bowl. By the March 18 deadline, over 2,100 entries had been uploaded to Doritosguru.ca, and were then sifted through by a panel of celebrity judges, including Toronto Raptor Chris Bosh, to select the top five finalists. The Doritos-eating public then had less than two weeks to vote for their favourite. The winner was revealed during MuchMusic program MuchOnDemand on May 1, after which point the new brand rolled out.
The winning ad depicts people conducting ordinary conversations – on the bus, at the dinner table – at an unnecessarily high volume, as if they’d spent hours listening to death metal, or in this case, eaten a bag of Scream Cheese Doritos. The ad ran for three weeks in May, and the new packaging hit stores last month.
A spokesperson for the gang of eight winners, who have a fledgling production company called Boo Ya Pictures, says the storyline was inspired by ‘rock ‘n’ roll and deep anger management issues.’ They will use the $25,000 cash prize to finance their first full-length feature film, and their story will also be featured on the packaging.
NISSAN CUBE: CAPITAL C AUDITIONS CREATIVES IN SOCIAL MEDIA-ONLY CAR LAUNCH
To sell cars these days, you need to get creative. This is the message behind Toronto-based Capital C’s ‘audition’ program for the Nissan Cube, which is being hailed as the first-ever social media-only launch of a car.
To find the target for the quirky, asymmetrical ‘mobile lounge,’ Cap C headed out to hotspots and tattoo parlours across Canada in search of the so-called Creative Class – the ‘graffiti artists and disc jockeys and dancers and such’ who live by their art – and invited them to vie for a chance to audition to win a Cube.
The 7,600 creative types who signed up for the first round were then whittled down to 500, who have since been ‘auditioning’ for one of 50 new blue Cubes. At
Hypercube.ca, each contestant has a multimedia ‘canvas’ which can be decorated with images, video, audio, text and of course, links to websites, blogs, YouTube and MySpace pages, all in the pursuit of the car – and all without a dollar spent on media. Sean Williams of Thornhill, ON, a.k.a. Cube Man, posts daily videos of himself wearing a cardboard Cube costume through the carwash, on the subway and anywhere he can catch the attention of the local news.
‘If you track the buzz metrics on the web, this thing is consistently at the top,’ says Capital C CEO Tony Chapman, adding that 61% of traffic to the site is referred, or driven by, the finalists themselves.
The winners will be determined through a combination of public votes (150,000 at press time) and celebrity jury, and their work will be showcased at presentation events in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal on June 17.
‘The old model was, ‘I will be in absolute control of how my car is presented to the public for the first time, I will have the perfect 30-second ad,” says Chapman. Bye-bye winding road, hello Cube Man.
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