The “it tastes just like ____!” moment
Lay’s Flavor Icons
There is a magic to LTO flavors
Or rather a moment, when you close your eyes and realize that yes, these “crispy taco” potato chips taste so spot on, there’s even a watery shredded lettuce note at the end. This is one of the things Lay’s does best, and something I will never fully understand because it involves chemistry and food science and I’m more of a soft sciences kind of gal. Inspired by this mind blowing moment, we pitched a program to Lay’s that would bring iconic regional restaurants and their signature dishes to fans across the country. I was a part of this program from creating the prizing mechanic to social video, POS and many things in between.
I kept the in-store headline short and simple, “iconic dishes on tasty chips!” explaining the program concept without taking up real estate on smaller point of sale pieces.
And then the pandemic happened…
And like most things in March of 2020, this project had to pivot FAST. With promotional details and POS already completed, we fought hard to keep this project alive, positioning it as a way for fans to experience new dishes in a time where just about the only place we were allowed to go was the grocery store. Ridiculous chip flavors couldn’t flatten the curve, but everyone needed something to break up the monotony of early quarantine (hell, look at how many people got into dalgona coffee or sourdough bread). With the client’s blessing, we changed our prizing to cash, added a donation to each of our restaurant partners, and began shooting our social video while socially distancing.
Our storyboard focused on what we know clients would respond to, pulling the concentric circles off of the newly-designed packaging and using them as a 3D wormhole element to compliment photos we shot and photos provided by the restaurants since we couldn’t travel.
An attitude of gratitude
To celebrate the program launch and send some love (in the form of $25k) to our restaurant partners, we pulled together custom layered shadowboxes that would bring together the bags, the social video design and the restaurants themselves.
The commemorative shadowbox for our brand team featured all 5 LTO flavors (4 with mass distribution and 1 Walmart exclusive), while the boxes sent to the restaurants were more personalized, leveraging the multimedia look + feel of the video content.
Design: Justin Lloyd, Jasper Dai and Samantha Roppolo
Video Production: Charlie Uniform Tango