Potato chips are largely an impulse buy, driven by in-store aisle promotions. However, as e-commerce and rapid delivery logistics has expanded rapidly across China, less and less consumers are going to grocery stores.

Thus, our challenge for Lays was set. Drive impulse purchases of Lay's in the era of e-commerce.

Cravings drive impulse buys.

By using mouth-watering visuals and aromas, brands are able to activate consumers' cravings.

For potato chips, however, the most potent sensory signal is actually sound – the cracking, crunching, munching of crisp potato chips. Hearing others munching on potato chips makes consumers want some too – the instant cravings and FOMO is real.

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

Traditional media has been on the decline amongst young audiences as they move online to social media (97%, source: China National Resident Survey). However, social media in China has become increasingly cluttered as ad investments have ballooned (estimated +36% in 2018 vs 2017, source: Statista).

Standing out and becoming a hit on social has become increasingly difficult.

Lay’s needed to activate this contagious chip sound in a louder way that would get fans involved in the fun!

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 in 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 short video and social challenge platform: Douyin (TikTok). Douyin has been China’s fastest growing mobile app (+560% average MAU growth in past year) with 272.4 million users in 2018 September. (Source: iResearch). Recently, the app has allowed brands and users to create challenges for others to follow – For example, asking friends to lip-sync to popular songs or do the ice bucket challenge.

Lay’s sent out its challenge: it asked users to create a funny lip-sync clip using a pre-roll that highlighted the sound of Lay's potato chips.

To set up the challenge, we enlisted top voice actor Bian Jiang to come up with a voice monologue that people could lip-sync to. This featured a hilarious script which prominently featured the crunchy sounds of Lay's potato chips.

To participate in the 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. 20 other key online influencers were also enlisted to give their own take and spread the crunchy sound of Lay’s, prompting fans all over China to create and share their own content.

The challenge itself encouraged people to buy a pack of Lay’s – and more importantly, the the crunchy sound of Lay's ignited fans' cravings nationwide.

By tapping into the creative and humorous use of the sound of Lay's chips, our social video challenge went viral, enlisting hundreds of thousands of fans to join in and create their own humorous social video content.

More than 217,000 fan videos were created and uploaded by fans, 482% higher than our historical benchmark.

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

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

Search index peaked during the campaign - 4x higher than before - and improved e-commerce performance - 3x faster than all previous months in 2018.