‘We Will Find You’ promotion tracks down Nestle prize winners by GPS

It's a plot that seems like a cross between James Bond and Willy Wonka. Nestlé has announced a new contest that will track winners through their chocolate bar wrappers.

The premise of the contest is pretty straightforward: you buy a candy bar and if you're lucky enough to open one of the six wrappers with a GPS built in, opening the candy will activate a GPS chip, which sends out a signal. Nestlé's prize team then has 24 hours to track the winners down and award them £10,000 (almost $16,000 CAD), ITProPortal reports.

You can confirm just how creepy this seems by watching the Nestlé ad:

The whole thing feels just a little too "Big Brother is watching" for some people out there. Since the contest opened earlier this month, the reaction hasn't been entirely positive, especially since this is happening in the U.K., where closed-circuit televisions are already an everyday reality. The YouTube comments on the above ad have been disabled, which can tell you plenty.

For the 'We Will Find You' promotion, a Nestlé spokesman explained that the company is hoping to target men by giving them some "added value" with their chocolate, according to a York Press story.

"Nestlé Confectionery is delighted to be first to market with this highly innovative GPS based promotion," said Graham Walker, Nestlé U.K.'s trade communications manager in a very PR-speak statement to York Press.

"We believe this promotion will particularly appeal to men, attracting them to the chocolate singles category and thus driving incremental sales."

With a sales pitch like that, how could you not want one?

On the whole, the contest isn't actually as freaky as it seems on the surface — at least not in comparison to contests run by some other companies. In 2010, Unilever put GPS tracking devices in boxes of Omo laundry detergent. When the detergent was purchased, the prize team rushed out and met you at your house as you got home from the store to tell you that you were a winner (at least, that was the goal). It wouldn't have been that bad, except Unilever also had a website that showed photos of the winners and an approximation of where they lived, which might have left some people feeling uneasy about their privacy.