Lay's puts a twist to Chinese custom of fortune telling with sticks

Using fortune telling sticks to predict the future is a well-known Chinese New Year custom. Potato chip's brand Lay's has decided to put its own twist to the tradition in Taiwan asking consumers to use a bag of chips instead. It has rolled out a mobile-based game to enable customers to predict their fortune ahead by scanning a piece of potato chip.

Lay’s Taiwan leveraged AI to help people predict their fortunes in the Year of the Tiger. By using their mobile phone, customers can scan a potato chip and the site will tell them how much luck they will enjoy in 2022 overall. Customers will also know what they can expect in five areas of their lives – wealth, health, love, family and school.

There are many predictions for customers. For example, they could "be like a god in stock investments"; "laugh all year long" and "enjoy  incalculable year-end bonus." Customers can also have the chance to increase their luck in the Year of the Tiger if they bravely "confess your love to a crush" or "proactively do the dishes for one week."

However not every prediction is pleasant. Customers could be warned of ominous times ahead. For example, they may receive "Love won’t stop, even if you want it to", or "Your boss will love you no matter what."

“Fortune telling sticks are a well-known Chinese New Year custom. We wondered if we could modernise this tradition and connect it with the Lay’s product in a way that helps Lay’s to engage with gen Z digital natives,” said Yuan Chuang, creative director of Leo Burnett Taiwan.

The brand has also unveiled the technology behind this game. Leo Burnett Taiwan had to teach the AI technology to recognise whether the objects were chips. Over 5,000 chip samples were used to train the AI and create data sets and the team needed to photograph about 5,000 chips and traced 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.

Also, Leo Burnett Taiwan created a vast database of fortune-telling sentences by using web-scraping and social listening programmes to collect popular buzzwords relating to the five fortune categories. According to the agency’s social listening database, getting a pay rise or a bonus, attaining financial freedom or getting an "all pass" to every subject were popular topics among gen Z.

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 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.

"People think their fortunes are written in the stars, but now they are written in a packet of Lay’s chips. 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.

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