Potato chips are largely an impulse buy, driven by in-store aisle promotions.

However, as eCommerce has expanded rapidly across the country, less and less customers are going to grocery stores.

Thus, our challenge for Lays was set. Drive impulse purchases in an era of eCommerce.

Impulse buys result from craving. Consumers crave by seeing mouth-watering visuals or smelling fresh aroma.

For potato chips, however, the most potent sensory signal is actually sound – the cracking, crunching, munching of crisp potato chips. Hearing other people munching on crisp potato chips makes people want some too – the instant craving is real.

Lay’s needed to amplify this sound to its advantage. The challenge was determining exactly how.

Traditional media has been on a decline among young people as they go more online for social media (97%, source: CNRS). However, social media has been more cluttered as ad investments have ballooned (estimated +36% in 2018 vs 2017, source: Statista).

Standing out and becoming a hit on social has become more demanding.

How then can Lay’s make this contagious chip sound louder, more memorable, and drive people to impulse ecommerce purchases of Lay’s?

It’s no surprise that humour is a big winner when it comes to the virality of social campaigns.

Hence, Lay’s contextualized the sound of chips around humorous and engaging contexts – essentially creating the auditory version of an infectious yawn.

We created our own funny Lay’s challenge on China’s top social challenge platform: Douyin.

Douyin has been China’s fastest growing app (+560% average MAU growth in past year) with 272.4 million users in 2018 September. (Source: iResearch) People record and share short video clips in the app. They can pose challenges for others to follow – for example: asking friends to lip-sync to popular songs.

Lay’s sent out its challenge: make a funny lip-sync clip using a pre-made monologue that highlights the sound of potato chips.

We enlisted top voice actor Bian Jiang to come up with a voice monologue that people can lip-sync to. This audio was a hilarious script which prominently featured the crunchy sound.

To successfully lip-sync, users needed to creatively act out their own interpretation of the audio script while biting into a Lay’s potato chip.

We invited top comedians Papi Jiang and Jingting Bai to create their own Douyin video as a sample for fans.

Twenty other key online influencers were also enlisted to give their own take.

Fans all over China created and spread their own content. The humour and people’s creative interpretations of the challenge quickly made the campaign spread.

The challenge itself encouraged people to buy a pack of Lay’s – and more importantly, the omnipresent crunchy sound all over the app stimulated more people to buy a bag of potato chips right away.

Our challenge went viral.

More than 217,000 videos were posted, 482% higher than our historical benchmark.

Video views reached 1.08 billion, which was 433% higher than benchmark.

Impressions were 511 million (+116% vs target) while engagement (likes, comments, shares) totalled 42 million.

Search index peaked during the campaign with 4 times higher than before, and more importantly, the campaign became the biggest contribution to the brand’s eCommerce performance with a 17% growth rate – 3 times faster than all previous months in 2018.