Meet Cheetos Vision, a mobile app that uses AI to turn anything you see into Cheetos snacks. All users have to do is take a picture or a video. Within seconds it appears as if the entire picture was made out of the cheesy snack, turning your ordinary posts into unique works of Cheetos art. We took an existing user behavior—taking selfies—and turned the resulting pics into something people can’t wait to share.

Cheesy selfies become cheesier selfies. Food pics become tasty Cheetos spreads. And your social feed becomes delicious. Because everything looks better in Cheetos.

The best part is that it’s perhaps the most branded app out there—every photo features hundreds of our product.

For weeks the team trained the AI until it was able to analyze every pixel by itself and look for shapes that would match each Cheetos attribute. Then it completely rebuilds the photo or video taken by the user as beautiful mosaics of Cheetos art.

Then we launched the app at SXSW, the premier tech event of the year, with a funny, tongue-in-cheek campaign featuring big, beautiful user-generated images made of Cheetos, with the line “Shot on #CheetosVision.”

Every ad in the campaign featured the contributor’s name along with their image. Then we turned our social feed into a gallery of our favorite Cheetos Vision images, encouraging fans to become Instagram famous by submitting their shots.

The app and the Cheetos Vision hashtag quickly spread to our fan base, and cheesy posts started hitting the web instantly.

Cheetos Vision launched at the 2018 SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. In the first week, it garnered over 300 million media impressions and thousands of downloads. It was also covered by the New York Times, the LA Times, Fast Company, Forbes, ABC, CBS, NBC, DesignTAXI and others.

Even more impressive, the anchors on Fox News used the app to turn themselves into Cheetos snacks. And fans themselves have posted hundreds of Cheetos Visions creations of selfies, food, cats and the world around them.

And even though the app is brand new, Frito-Lay Pakistan, Frito-Lay Australia and Frito-Lay Philippines have all requested to have it adapted for their markets, bringing Cheetos Vision to the world.

Cheetos fans are notoriously mischievous. They love pranks and turning the mundane on its head. Mischief helps them reconnect with their inner kid.

They regularly post pictures of themselves bathing in tubs of Cheetos, curling their hair with Cheetos, creating their own Cheetos art and wearing Cheetos-themed clothing. It’s not just a snack to them—it’s a lifestyle.

On a cultural level, photo-filter apps have become hugely popular as the technology has become increasingly advanced. In 2018, AI apps like Google Arts & Culture, Prisma and Pikazo went viral. We wanted to turn this trend on its head and help fans poke fun at our photo-obsessed culture. So we used AI in the most ridiculous way possible, turning your photos and videos into Cheetos snacks.

That’s why we launched the app alongside all the other “serious” innovations at SXSW, the premier tech event of the year.

The Internet loves creating art out of Cheetos® snacks. Just a quick Google search of “Cheetos art” brings up several cheesy mosaics of Barack Obama, Conan O’Brien and other celebrities—all made out of Cheetos snacks.

At the same time, photo-filter apps have become hugely popular in recent years. It seems like everyone is obsessed with the next “it” filter or style transfer, turning their selfies into impressionist paintings, cubist masterpieces and more.

So we capitalized on both of these trends by creating an AI-powered style-transfer app that lets fans turn their photos into pieces of Cheetos art.