Lay's, a famous snack brand, has set sights on winning over the Vietnamese market's elusive and discerning Gen Z demographic. The stakes are high, with Gen Z's spending power of over $10 billion annually on food and drink purchases. Despite being a prime target for brands and marketers, Gen Z is still a big mystery.

Lay's Vietnam aimed to capture this market by launching a promotion product line catering to Gen Z's aesthetics, taste, and pricing preferences. However, capturing the heart and mind of this generation is easier said than done. Gen Z is notoriously selective with advertising content, prioritizing authenticity, novelty, and product innovation. Lay's Vietnam understood this but was determined to succeed, whereas others had failed by delivering products that genuinely resonated with Gen Z's tastes and preferences. With this ambitious goal, Lay's Vietnam was set to become the leading player in the battlefield of winning young consumers.

Lay’s sought to unveil the mystery behind our target audience, Gen Z teenagers. First, they were the perfect storm of social creatures and authenticity champions. They valued social connections and inclusivity and thus thrived on inside jokes and schooling slice-of-life content. At the same time, they were always looking for quirkiness and craved the freedom to express themselves to their hearts’ content. These traits thus rocket TikTok as Gen Z’s indispensable medium but attract countless uninspiring advertisements that often push youth away rather than gravitate towards.

Therefore, we turned the norm on its head by pioneering the non-branded branding idea with the #BanTinChungVui audio campaign. We created utterly brand-free, no-music soundbites in the form of a newsletter about Gen Z daily school context and inside jokes and invited them to let loose creativity by expressing these audios into short-form videos through their unique points of view.

#BanTinChungVui non-branded branding approach was successful thanks to 2 key strategies, our closed loop of O2O2O journey and a carefully curated list of KOLs and content creator community. The closed loop started with players creating short videos with any of Lay’s three distinctive audios. We then broadcasted these videos offline via pre-booked Digital OOH at high-traffic locations to champion their creativity. We recruited more teenagers to go onto TikTok to join the fun.

To amplify social buzz, we carefully recruited KOLs with high resonance among teenagers and leading TikTok creators to interpret their video versions of the soundbites however they saw fit while natively injecting the new Lay’s fun-size packaging into them, so viewers are both inspired to create and made aware of Lay’s new packaging in 3 different tasty flavors.

Lay’s campaign began with TikToker CHI XE sharing her video version of the first soundbite with Lay’s packaging imagery, which became a big hit and went viral just three days after launch. It was then accompanied by videos from other creators among Lay’s curated lists. All of them were well received by teenagers, inspiring them to join the fun and create visual interpretations.

Riding high on the waves, we collected all user-generated submissions. We aired them across dynamic billboards at primetime hours in 2 metropolitans of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh to honor our player’s quirkiness and spread the word about #BanTinChungVui. The same loop was repeated for the remaining two audios, which also became massive hits. An Interactive TikTok in-feed ad was also deployed to reach the audience but kept to a minimum to ensure the most native interaction between Lay’s and Gen Z.

The campaign at hand was a monumental triumph that far exceeded all expectations. With a remarkable 56 million engagements and an astounding 1 billion views, eight times greater than the market benchmark, Lay's cemented its place in a league of its own. The campaign also produced an exceptional 340,000 video creations, a remarkable 390% over the KPI, attesting to its artistic merit.

To its many achievements, Lay's also managed to win over the hearts of Vietnamese teenagers and successfully integrated into the lives of Generation Z, thanks to its product line specifically tailored to their needs. This impressive feat reflects an unprecedented level of performance that is unrivaled in the industry. The remarkable sales figures for Lay's snack pack, which exceeded 130,000 units in just three weeks during the campaign's run, serve as a testament to this remarkable campaign's overwhelming success and lasting impact.