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