South East Asia is a highly saturated snack market with plenty of competing brands. So, how do we make Lay’s Potato chips the coolest chips around, especially towards an audience that spends hours and hours eating crisps while streaming video, 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 while watching movies or any other content. 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. A Chrome extension to Youtube that automatically activates subtitles every time it detects that you are munching chips. Yes indeed, ‘voice-crisp-activated' subtitle technology’ to allow you to make binge watching a better experience.

Key audience for Lays 15-25. They are 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, share, and start a conversation around the uniqueness of Lays - being the crispiest chip of all. Crispy Subtitles was conceived and made in Belgium but locally launched in Vietnam at Lunar New Year, when Youtube traffic in the region increases with 600%. Via influencers and tech press, it spread 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 ‘voice-crispsound-activated subtitle technology’ was achieved by feeding machine learning with 178 hours of audio recordings of people eating chips, from all over the world. From this, the Google Chrome extension - plugin- was built. Once downloaded, the extension will activate LAYS-branded subtitles on Youtube the second it detects crisp sounds. So to be clear: crisp sounds = subtitles. No more crisp sounds, no more subtitles.

The ‘crispy subtitles’ shows specific 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.

Considering the brief - how to make Lays the coolest chips around – the success was phenomenal. The plugin was being written about and shared across 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.