Doritos is planning to boldly go where no brand has gone before by broadcasting an advert into space.

In a £2.5m campaign to reinvigorate flat sales, it is launching an on-pack drive this month inviting consumers to make an advert and submit it to its website.

It will then ask the public to vote for their favourites and select an overall winner whose advertisement will be broadcast for two weeks in June on ITV, Channel 4 and satellite TV - and into space on 12 June.

"We're pushing the boundaries," said marketing director Thomas Delabriere. "We are encouraging consumers to interact with the brand in a way they've never done before."

The space-bound advertisements, complete with sound and images, will be broadcast from an ultra-high frequency radar from the EISCAT Space Centre in Svalbard, Norway.

The transmission is being directed towards planets in the solar system of the star 47 Ursae Majoris, which is 42 light years from Earth and is located in the Ursa Major constellation, also known as the Great Bear.

It is very similar to our sun and hosts a habitable zone that could potentially harbour small terrestrial planets, according to the PepsiCo-owned brand.

The You Make It, We Play It promotion will also include a £20,000 cash prize for the winner, £1,000 for four runners up and weekly prizes of camcorders and holidays to the United States.

Promotional packs will start rolling out this month. It will be supported through direct mail, online, in-store and press ads.

Doritos sales rose just 0.6% to £76.6m in the 12 months to 6 October [Nielsen]. This compared with 3.5% overall growth for the £1.9bn bagged snacks market.

In 2001, Pizza Hut delivered vacuum-sealed pizzas to the International Space Station and had its logo placed on the side of the Russian Proton rocket.

Earlier plans to launch orbiting billboard advertising in space were ditched in the 1990s after it was found that space debris would damage the image.

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