Taipei, Taiwan – Playing on the Chinese New Year tradition of using fortune sticks to get predictions and fortune, potato chips brand Lay’s in Taiwan took this step further: by using artificial intelligence and their own line of potato chips.
Through Lay’s Fortune Telling ‘lucky cam’, users can scan a single chip and then the ‘lucky cam’ telling you how much luck you will enjoy in 2022 overall, and what to expect in five areas of your life – Wealth, Health, Love, Family and School.
Some of those predictions include ‘You may be like a god in stock investments’, ‘You will laugh all year long’ and ‘Your year-end bonus is incalculable’.
The campaign was conceptualised alongside Leo Burnett Taiwan, where the agency first had to teach artificial intelligence (AI) technology to recognise whether different objects really are chips or not. Over 5,000 chip samples were used to train the AI and create data sets. This meant photographing 5,000 chips and painstakingly tracing their edges, nooks and crinkles. With between 1,500 and 2,000 data points in every outline, it took between three and five minutes to document each chip by hand.
From here, the agency created a vast database of fortune-telling sentences by using web-scraping and social listening programs to collect popular buzzwords relating to the five fortune categories. According to the agency’s social listening database, getting a raise or a bonus, attaining ‘financial freedom’ or getting an ‘All Pass’ to every subject are popular topics among Gen Z in the lead up to Chinese New Year.
Yuan Chuang, creative director at Leo Burnett Taiwan, said, “Fortune telling sticks are a well-known Chinese New Year custom. We wondered if we could modernize this tradition and connect it with Lay’s product in a way that helps Lay’s to engage with Gen Z digital natives. We challenged ourselves to use machine learning to do something that’s never been done before: could we tell people’s fortunes using something as unexpected and silly as the shape of potato chips.”
Meanwhile, Tina Liu, marketing head at Lay’s Taiwan, commented, “People think their fortunes are written in the stars, but now they are written in a packet of Lay’s chips. It has been lots of fun working with the team at Leo Burnett Taiwan to build a new consumer habit of buying Lay’s during Chinese New Year. We hope you will give Lay’s Fortune Telling Chips a try, and we wish you huge five-star luck in 2022.”
Divided into four levels of luck and five fortune categories, the Lay’s Fortune Telling Chips web experience delivers over one million fortune combinations. This ensures each fortune is unique no matter how many chips are scanned or eaten along the way.