Lay's selfie-focused 'Smiles' campaign returns, building on success of 1st run

Dive Brief:

Lay's is bringing back its limited-run "Smiles" packaging featuring photos of real people smiling following a successful first run of the concept last year, according to details shared with Marketing Dive. The special bags of Traditional, Wavy, Lightly Salted, Poppables and Kettle-Cooked Lay's will be on shelves nationwide by July 28.
For the second iteration of the campaign, created with agency The Marketing Arm, the Frito-Lay brand will spotlight 32 "Everyday Smilers" working toward improving their communities. One includes Paige Chenault, who runs a nonprofit called the Birthday Party Project that puts on birthday parties for homeless children. As with last year, Lay's will donate $1 million total toward Operation Smile, which helps provide surgeries to children born with cleft conditions. Facebook content the brand produced with Operation Smile last year received a 14% engagement rate, 12 points higher than the industry average, per a press release.
Lay's also claims that the initial "Smiles" push led to 700 selfies posted per day with bags of the brand’s products across an eight-week run. The #SmileWithLays campaign hashtag was featured on more than 30,000 tweets and 10,000 Instagram posts during that period, and a special Snapchat filter averaged 21 seconds of play time and resulted in 2.8 million shares, or a share rate of 13%, according to Lay's.

Dive Insight:

Lay's is dipping back into a packaging concept focused on personalization and driving engagement with valuable, social media savvy audiences like millennials. The first crack at the idea appears to have paid off for the snack maker, and Lay's is putting a bigger focus on the charitable aspect of the campaign this go around in potential recognition of young consumers' louder calls for cause-driven marketing.

Around the launch of the 2018 push, Lay's shared research showing that 95% of surveyed consumers would smile more if they knew it could brighten someone's day. The sunnier angle of the "Smiles" packaging recognized that many people are not happy with the current state of society, a level of dissatisfaction marketers are increasingly trying to address through positive messaging.

But the "Smiles" effort, with packaging described as "Insta-worthy," is centered just as much on encouraging user-generated content, and Lay's is clearly angling to recapture the online buzz that spread across Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter last year. Other brands have deployed similar strategies that layer selfie-taking into more traditional marketing tactics. Absolut last year ran a "Global Selfie" campaign that encouraged travelers to upload photos of themselves in airports to an online platform that would then send the selfies to outdoor digital displays.

On top of social media elements like the Snapchat lenses, the 2018 "Smiles" campaign included TV spots and a three-day pop-up experience in New York City. The current effort will include paid support, including TV advertising, a spokesperson told Marketing Dive, and the press release notes that the stories of the "Everyday Smilers" will "be revealed" in the coming weeks.

Frito-Lay's North American segment again proved the strongest performer for parent company PepsiCo in Q2 results released earlier this month, according to CNBC. The snacks unit, which also owns brands like Doritos, Cheetos and Tostitos, saw 5% organic revenue growth for the quarter.