If you’ve always thought your taste buds were ahead of the curve, Lay’s Canada has the contest for you.

The potato chip giant's "Do Us a Flavour" campaign is asking its customers to send in their own flavor ideas and dangling a rarely-seen carrot—profit sharing—to the winner. The top four flavor ideas will roll off the production line and on to store shelves this summer with the most popular one—as determined by voting on Facebook, of course—added permanently to the Lay’s line-up. The creators of the final four are guaranteed to receive $5,000 but the big winner will get a $50,000 check plus receive 1 percent of their flavor’s sales for as long as it remains sufficiently popular to cut the muster.

Hey, how about mustard chips?Continue reading...

What does PepsiCo believe in even more than Beyonce? The answer might be crowdsourcing.

Sunday's Super Bowl halftime show served as the main kickoff to its huge investment in the globally popular entertainer with a concert that some felt usurped the game itself. But the walkup to her much-anticipated performance used a highly populist approach that underscored PepsiCo-Frito Lay's faith in the crowd as much as any pop star.

The bulk of the ad, produced by NYC-based Mekanism, featured a lightning-fast succession of Pepsi enthusiasts culled from more than 120,000 photos submitted to the brand via New York-based Olapic and Crowdtwist. Olapic collected and curated the pictures while CrowdTwist rewarded uploads through a point-based platform. Mekanism, as TIME puts it, took that material in a bid to manufacture "viral on demand" for the Pepsi brand.Continue reading...

With the third season of MTV's Jersey Shore now wrapped, and the fourth season in Italy not quite in sight, parodies of the show that made stars of Snooki, The Situation and JWoww and added "GTL" to the lexicon, have begun to arise.  

One recent parody burning up YouTube aired last week on Jimmy Kimmel’s late night talk show on ABC. It stars Martin Short, Martin Short, Martin Short, and Martin Short, as the comic actor spoofs each cast member in turn. The video, a mock “red band trailer,” is (of course) called Jersey Short.   

This isn’t the first video to spoof the show, or even the first to appear on Jimmy Kimmel. And to add to the fun, MTV is now parodying the series with its own knock-off.Continue reading...