For their latest advertising campaign, "You make it, we play it", Doritos extended the brief to the Australian public. Borrowing the concept from similar campaigns run in the USA and UK, viewers were asked to create a 29 second (spot on, not a second more or less!) ad for Doritos. The Australian public gets to vote for their favourite entry and the winner takes away a tidy $20,000 prize and national airplay for their ad.
This seems like quite a clever strategy. It enabled Doritos to connect with their target audience, generate interest in the brand and build a large body of creative work for future use. And all this for very minimal cost outlay - much less than paying for an agency to do the same job.
This isn't the only reason that the campaign gained attention though. Back in February, when the campaign launched, it came out that the advertising agency behind the idea had run a seeding exercise and pre-populated the competition website for launch. They approached a few people to make some ads and get the ball rolling. Seems fair enough.
Mumbrella didn't agree. It reported that the leader of the competition was signed up weeks before the competition even launched and argued that it was unfair to other competitors. The agency behind the campaign countered with the exercise being about quality, not quantity. I tend to agree. Rather than uploading agency 'examples', the early entries served to populate the site, set the creative bar and inspire others to dream bigger and better.
In case you're interested, here's the entry that caused all the hoopla. It wasn’t even one of the top five.