Is your destiny written in a potato chip? Using AI, it could be. In the Year of the Tiger campaign by Lay’s and Leo Burnett Taiwan, potato chips and artificial intelligence are taking over from the traditional fortune sticks to help people predict their fortunes.
A single chip, scanned using the Lay’s Fortune Telling lucky cam will tell 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.
The Year of the Tiger might hold, “You may be like a god in stock investments”, “You will laugh all year long” or “Your year-end bonus is incalculable”, for instance. Users will also have the chance to increase their luck level in the Year of the Tiger if they bravely “Confess your love to a crush” or “Proactively do the dishes for one week”. They will be warned of ominous times ahead (“Love won’t stop, even if you want it to”) or receive helpful hints (“Your boss will love you – no matter what”).
“Fortune-telling sticks are a well-known Chinese New Year custom. We wondered if we could modernize this tradition and connect it with the Lay’s product in a way that helps Lay’s to engage with Gen Z digital natives,” explained Yuan Chuang, creative director at Leo Burnett Taiwan. “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?”
To make the project possible, Leo Burnett Taiwan had to teach 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 there, 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” and getting an “All Pass” in every subject are popular topics among Gen Z in the lead up to Chinese New Year. After analysing the construction of traditional fortune-telling poems and sentences, Leo Burnett Taiwan generated Lay’s fortune-telling sentences by mixing popular buzzwords and song lyrics together using NLP (Natural Language Processing) AI.
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.
“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,” commented Tina Liu, marketing head at Lay’s Taiwan.
Discover your Lay’s fortune analysis here.
Credits
Client: Lay’s Taiwan
Agency: Leo Burnett Taiwan
Chief Creative Officer: Kevin Yang
Creative Director: Yuan Chuang
Creative Technologist: Hao Tseng
Senior Art Director: Yao Song
Lead Engineer: Tom Chen
Project Manager: Wei Tang
Interactive Developer: Ben Chen