LAY’S is the most widely sold potato chip brand in the world. But not in every country. In Brazil, LAY’S were lagging behind some competitors – especially one competitor, which can’t even be called a potato chip. Locally, the brand had a challenge: to show that while its potato chips are made of real potatoes, the rival brand has much more than potatoes in it, and can’t be called a potato chip at all. So the objective here was to make a clear statement: only LAY’S are made of real potatoes.

We decided to draw attention to something unusual to show that our potato chips are made of real potatoes. We showed our Call Center, or our Customer Service, doesn’t get any calls questioning our products, because they’re actually made with potatoes. We also showed a competitor’s Customer Service center in complete chaos, flooded with calls about why all of the chips are the same size and shape, how much potato goes into them, and so on. And then we offered our customer service workforce to our customers. That’s right, we offered our people to solve problems for them over the phone. If they needed to call someone, we could make that call. Why? Because our customer service attendants have nothing to do. So we created options on a website, where people could choose what we should do for them.

In researching and talking with people from the brand, we noticed there’s something really good about having a product made with potato, oil, salt and nothing else. Nobody calls your Customer Service questioning the ingredients of your product – because there are no ingredients to question. So we used this fact to create PR, and we made this the core of our campaign. But the campaign had to be relevant for online platforms like Facebook and Instagram. So, we offered our workforce to make calls on behalf of our customers, making the campaign more engaging, fun and interactive. This approach made people love the campaign.

First we aired an online film showing our customer service with no calls coming in, and the competitor’s customer service, which was being flooded with calls questioning their product. We offered our available workforce to make calls for our customers and invited them to our website, so they could ask us what to do. Then we made the calls, recorded them, and sent them to our customers. The whole activation happened over the course of 2 weeks. The website was crowded, and the number of requests was massive.

The campaign’s fun, sarcastic tone made it reach even more people, because the organic reactions were huge. The campaign accumulated 170 million impressions, with 27 million views, twice as many complete views than the average brand campaign. It lifted the brand to +8 points of recall, +4.2 points of message association and +6.3 points of interest from potential consumers. It also boosted sales by 6% over last month. We received more than 10,000 requests on our website, and the brand had to hire 7 more people to respond to the Customer Service demand (because this was way more than expected). All this within one month after the campaign aired. Now, Lay’s is also more associated with real potatoes than any other brand.