Lay’s Are Everywhere in Joyful New Ad

People cannot live on chips alone – but in the latest Lay’s ad from agency Highdive, they have a pretty good try. The new commercial, “Only Lay’s”, opens with a farmer identifying by sight which potatoes make the grade for Lay’s chips and goes into a series of vignettes united by a single word: “Lay’s”. A guy gets his bag checked at the airport – it’s full of Lay’s. A singer does a microphone test – singing the word “Lay’s”. And a group of friends on a road trip turn their car right around – the reason? “No Lay’s”.

What do these fun little scenarios have in common? The idea that when you want to do something joyful, it goes better with a pack of Lay’s to hand. It’s positioning the brand as an accompaniment not just to traditional social occasions – parties, game nights, movie watching – but to anything that might be exciting and fun. As the ad itself says: Lay’s turns potatoes into “simple joy”.

The quirky scenarios Lay’s come up with spark joy in our sample audience too. Among a nationally representative sample of viewers, “Only Lay’s” scored an impressive 4.5-Stars, predicting strong potential for share gain given the right level of investment in the ad. Salted Snacks is a highly competitive category, with a 3.7-Star average for all ads – well above the overall video average on Test Your Ad. So it’s even more important that an ad like this one beats that benchmark and delivers high effectiveness.

On our other Test Your Ad metrics, “Only Lay’s” shines brighter still. It gets an Exceptional short-term Spike Rating, again in a very-high scoring category – so the ad is doing its part to create immediate sales impact. And as you might expect from such a strongly branded commercial, “Only Lay’s” also scores an Exceptional rating on Brand Fluency – it’s extremely unlikely you’ll come away from this ad not realizing who made it!

With the product so prominent in the ad, it’s no surprise that positive associations and responses focus on it – taste is the key association, and sensory pleasure alongside amusement as a source of happiness. As for why the ad works so well, look no further than the high level of human connection and “between-ness” in Lay’s’ commercial: these elements help the ad get the attention of the right brain, which takes notice of relationships and context. The right brain also digs humor, like the subversion of expected outcomes when a passenger holdall turns out to be full of potato chips. As shown in Orlando Wood’s books Look Out and Lemon, right-brain elements are associated with long-term effectiveness.

So it’s another highly effective ad in a demanding category from Lay’s.