During Chinese New Year, Taiwanese people tend to buy more snacks than usual in order to cater gatherings of family and friends. However, Lay’s has been around for ages, so it seems everyone knows of it, but it’s not the top pick of many when stocking up for the holidays. Our main TA, Gen Z, sees the brand as old school and lacking excitement, therefore lacking a reason to purchase. That’s why Lay’s needed a campaign that would appeal to Gen Z during this period of time that would grasp their attention and engage with the brand.

As Lay’s chips are sliced from fresh potatoes, you will never find two pieces that are completely identical. With that we created the first ever potato chip database, using machine learning to analyze the shapes of over 10,000 pieces of chips. Users just need to simply scan any piece of Lay’s chips to receive a different fortune prediction every single time. Different results inspired by the keywords we learnt from social listening were generated with every chip, for example: “You will be a stock investment god”, “Swipe right 10 times on Tinder” or “Your year-end bonus is incalculable”. To encourage more sharing, we also used web crawlers to find out the latest buzz words to incorporate into the results, then Natural Language Processing AI was used to generate over 1 million fortune combinations.

We believe the key to whether an interactive digital experience will be well received by consumers has a lot to do with whether the experience feels authentic. So we used data technology throughout the journey, from scanning and analyzing the chip to presenting the results in a poem-like style (as most fortune predictions are provided in a similar style in Taiwan).

We used AI to generate the fortune and crop out its shape to paste the actual piece of chip on the results. By social listening, we filtered out the latest buzz words amongst Gen Z, then utilized natural language processing AI to generate the poems, for results that would resonate with our target audience and encourage them to share.

This year you won’t need to go to temples to find out your luck for the new year. Grab your phone, turn on your camera, and get your fortune prediction from Lay’s anytime and anywhere! From TV commercials, social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, to retail settings in supermarkets and convenience stores, a QR code was placed alongside wherever you could see or buy a packet of Lay’s. Use the camera on your mobile phone to scan a Lay’s potato chip of your choice, and the system will generate your fortune for the coming year based on the shape of each chip.

We also held an online event to search for the luckiest person in Taiwan, prompting more to share their results and further broaden the reach, making it one of the most talked about campaigns this Chinese New Year.

Over 200,000 fortune predictions (predictions covering five areas of their life, created using a vast database of fortune-telling sentences) have been generated within a week. The click-through rate of the digital experience is amazing: over 80% of visitors went through the whole experience from the first step to the last, and each visitor generated 4.13 quatrains on average, engaging with the Lay’s fortune telling web application repeatedly.

This campaign has also set serval milestones for Lay’s Taiwan:

1. Sales of Lay’s had a double-digit growth compared to the same period last year

2. Market share of Lay’s became the highest in 3 years

3. Social media account followers grew by 18%, while 85% of the new followers represent our target market of Gen Z

4. A total of 2.4 million impressions on social media