Lay’s Taiwan Uses AI and Potato Chips to Predict Your New Year Fortunes

Lay’s and Leo Burnett Taiwan are using artificial intelligence to help people predict their fortunes in the Year of the Tiger using one of the world’s most universally beloved snacks: a bag of potato chips.  

Developed by Leo Burnett Taiwan, the Lay’s Fortune Telling Chips web experience is designed to get people’s attention by providing a fresh take on the Chinese New Year tradition of using fortune sticks.  

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.  

With predictions like, ‘You may be like a god in stock investments’, ‘You will laugh all year long’ and ‘Your year-end bonus is incalculable’, you will also have the chance to increase your luck level in the Year of the Tiger if you bravely ‘Confess your love to a crush’ or ‘Proactively do the dishes for one week’. You 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’).  

According to Chinese zodiac, 2022 is the Year of the Tiger, which runs from 1st February until 21st January 2023. 

“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,” explains 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 this project possible, Leo Burnett Taiwan 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.  

After analyzing 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,” says Tina Liu, Marketing Head at Lay’s Taiwan.  

To have your fortune told, simply scan a potato chip using the Lay’s Fortune Telling Chips website and your destiny for the Year of the Tiger will be revealed.  

Discover your Lay’s fortune analysis here.