Doritos Unleashes Sweet Chili Lovers on Willing Webcammers

To promote its Sweet Chili packs, Doritos Brazil adds a touch of the surreal to your day.

Click on "Liberte seu Doritos Lover" ("liberate your Doritos lover") in the upper left-hand corner of the Doritos Sweet Chili website, then enable it to access your webcam. Your presence on-screen is supposed to stimulate the release of a "Doritos lover" -- a friendly cartoon monster, of which over 18 trillion unique variants are possible, says Contagious Mag.

Put together by Cubocc/Sao Paulo, 23,000 lovers are being liberated each week. They can be added to Orkut profiles, photographed, given birth certificates or put up for adoption.

Lovers also have a wildcard characteristic that gives this effort something extra. Pretty much on a whim, your mischievous monster can randomly introduce you to other owners.

We'd be crazy not to join in all the fun of being hooked up with strangers by (adorable, if creepy) personified algorithms. But as demonstrated at left, our Sweet Chili lover didn't want to come out and play, even after (or maybe because?) we turned on all the lights like the video prompt suggested.

Rejected by a cartoon bot. There's a fun first.

Update: Adverblog points out that this wasn't an actual case of cartoon monsters giving us the cold shoulder. Apparently you need an augmented reality code, available in packs of Doritos Sweet Chili, to fully release a Doritos lover. Well, that makes sense. Nice purchasing incentive!