Vietnam is a highly saturated snack market with plenty of competing brands. So, how do we make Lays stand out from the crowd. How do we make Lay’s Potato chips the coolest chips around, especially towards an audience that spends hours and hours eating crisps while watching YouTube but doesn’t pay enough attention to ads.

It’s an ‘age-old problem’: you can’t hear a thing when you’re crunching chips while streaming video (and Lays are the crispiest chip of all). And as much as it is a first-world problem, not being able to hear video while eating chips is something we’ve all experienced. And reaching for a laptop’s volume buttons with greasy fingers just creates even more problems. Luckily, Lays came to the rescue with Crispy Subtitles. An AI-powered Chrome extension to Youtube that automatically activates subtitles when it detects that you are munching chips. Yes indeed, ‘crisp-activated subtitle technology’ to allow you to snack and watch youtube at the same time. Making binge watching a better experience.

Key audience is 15-25, this group is very active on youtube and open to trying new things. Traditional advertising does not work on this group. So we had to find a way to get them to interact with and start a conversation around the uniqueness of Lays, being the crispiest chip of all. Crispy Subtitles was launched at Lunar New Year, when Youtube traffic in Vietnam increases with 600%. Announcing it via influencers and getting the plugin published to Vietnam’s largest tech publications. From there it was seeded into various social groups, spreading organically across social groups, and onto Vietnam’s largest forums and publications. Then it quickly went beyond borders. The global tech and broader community loved this, being talked about on the largest websites, podcasts, and reviews. With 1.5 billion people watching Youtube every day, this ‘Lays subtitle technology’ was something clearly relevant to everyone.

This ‘crisp-activated subtitle technology’ was achieved by feeding an AI with 178 hours of audio recordings of people eating chips, from all over the world. From this, the algorithm and the Google Chrome extension - plugin- was built. Once downloaded, the extension will activate YouTube subtitles the microsecond it detects that you are munching crispy chips while watching Youtube.

When this crispy subtitles extension is at work it will show you the subtitles in Lays colour (yellow) and it will also briefly display the Crispy Subtitles logo in the top right corner. The crisp-activated subtitles will always be shown in your preferred language, since the extension automatically links to the language settings of your computer.

The plugin was an instant hit in Vietnam and beyond, being written about in dozens of tech and general publications and becoming front page news across online journals. Being shared across all largest social communities with ridiculously high engagement (+1085% compared to other Lays campaigns) on Facebook, Youtube, and TikTok. Within a week Crispy Subtitles was listed on Google search trends and featured in approximately 200 global publications, vlogs, podcasts, and talk shows. With 1.2 billion impressions, $9,000,000 in earned media, a global reach of 210,000,000 people and thousands of downloads in 80 different countries - achieved with a 15,000 dollar budget only - Lays managed to get a crazy 600:1 return on investment.