News from Doritos

ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR ADVERTISING

DORITOS TO BROADCAST THE FIRST EVER ADVERT INTO SPACE AND OUT TO THE UNIVERSE

The world’s first ever commercial advertising campaign is to be broadcast into space, Doritos announced today. Doritos, as part of its new ‘You Make It, We Play It’ initiative, is asking the British public to shoot a 30-second ad that will be beamed past the Earth’s atmosphere and into the Universe, to anyone ‘out there’ that may be watching. The winning ad will also be aired on the more conventional medium of British television.

The space bound ad will be broadcast from a 500MHz Ultra High Frequency Radar from the EISCAT Space Centre in Svalbard, Norway. The transmission is being directed at a solar system just 42 light years away from Earth with planets that orbit its star ‘47 Ursae Majoris’ (UMa). 47 UMa is located in the ‘Ursa Major’ or Great Bear Constellation. It is very similar to our Sun and hosts a habitable zone that could potentially harbour small terrestrial planets and support life similar to ours.

Peter Charles, Head of the Doritos Broadcast Project said: “We are constantly looking to push the boundaries of advertising and this new campaign will go further than any brand has gone before. By broadcasting the winning ad to the Universe, Doritos is delivering a world first and giving someone from this country the chance to go down in advertising folklore. We also shouldn’t be too surprised if the first aliens that arrive on planet Earth immediately demand a bag of Doritos.”

The Doritos Broadcast Project is being undertaken in association with expert astronomers and academics from Leicester University and is also being supported by EISCAT (The European Incoherent SCATter Scientific Association), which studies solar-planetary interactions and operate a series of radar systems, including the Svalbard based transmitter.

Professor Tony van Eyken, Director of EISCAT, said: “Broadcasting an advert extra terrestrially is a big and exciting step for everyone on Earth as up until now we have only tended to listening for incoming transmissions. There have been reports that NASA beamed a Beatles song towards the Polaris star system, though as this is a 1,000 light year round trip, it’s highly unlikely it will ever be received by extra-terrestrials. With the transmission technology and planning we are employing there is a much greater chance that the Doritos advert will potentially be seen by billions of aliens.”

In addition to going down in the advertising annals for this unique first, the filmmaker responsible for the winning ad will also win £20,000. Entries to the Doritos’ ‘You Make It, We Play It’ competition can be submitted via the Doritos website -www.doritos.co.uk. The deadline for entries is midnight on May 18. The extra-terrestrial broadcast is scheduled for June 12, and the ad will be aired on British TV from June 15.