Two Creative Choices Behind Lay’s® TikTok Triumph

For this week’s Ad Of The Week we’re going back in time to February, the Super Bowl, and the most effective ad of the big game night – “Little Farmer” from Lay’s®. The ad, created with agency Highdive, told the story of a family farm that grows the potatoes which eventually become Lay’s® chips. The family’s young daughter sees a potato fall off a truck, and rather than let it go to waste she plants it. She nurses the potato plant through rain and shine and then gets to proudly present a potato to her farmer dad to add to the next delivery.

The ad scored a maximum 5.9-Stars on System1’s Test Your Ad, the winner on Super Bowl night and the first maximum effectiveness big game ad in years. It’s a wonderful commercial, but why are we featuring it now?

It’s because “Little Farmer” also excels on TikTok, and the decisions Lay’s® and Highdive took to make it work on that platform are interesting for marketers looking to understand short-form advertising on TikTok.

In our new report on TikTok ad effectiveness, The Long and the Short (form) of it, we go into detail looking at the creative elements that make a social short-form ad effective. We consider the different impact of creator-led and brand-originated ads, and also explore how creative quality compounds repeat exposure for a TikTok ad. Created in partnership with TikTok themselves, it’s an essential guide to how to thrive on modern, video-led social media.

With the cut-down version of “Little Farmer”, Lay’s® and Highdive prove they know how to make ads work on the platform too. The original TV versions are 30 and 60 seconds long, and tell the full story of the young wannabe farmer. Not every story beat can fit into 15 seconds for TikTok though, so the social ad cuts to the climax of the story faster, showing the moment when the girl digs up her crop and gives it to her dad, without the backstory of the lost potato.

Why was that the right choice? Because it focuses on the emotional peak of the original ad, a moment of human connection and family feeling that backs up the essential message of the campaign – Lay’s® uses potatoes from real family farms. There often isn’t room in a short-form ad to create a full emotional story arc like the original commercial did so well. So it makes sense to linger on the critical heartwarming moment, rather than risk rushing it by trying to cram in the whole story.

The other really vital decision that Lay’s® gets right is moving the final scene of the Super Bowl ad – the family sitting in the sun sharing a bag of Lay’s® potato chips – to right at the beginning of the TikTok version. Something our TikTok report stresses repeatedly is how important early branding is to the success of a social ad. While emotional impact helps build long-term brand effects on social, early branding is what turns emotion into short-term sales boosts and conversion. So Lay’s® shows the product right away, to get that early branding effect.

We ran the TikTok version through our new Test Your Ad Social platform, and “Little Farmer” scored a very strong 4.7-Star Rating, at the top end of US Digital ad effectiveness. Remixing the story still left the commercial in the top tier for long-term, emotional, brand-building impact.

But Test Your Ad Social also includes newer measures designed particularly to test the elements we know work best on platforms like TikTok. One of these is Fast Fluency, the proportion of viewers who recognize the brand within the first two seconds, and the TikTok “Little Farmer” scored an Exceptional result here. 89% of viewers recognized the ad as a Lay’s® ad within 2 seconds, almost twice the 46% average for US digital video. It’s empirical proof that the choice to move the scene with the Lay’s® bag to the beginning, and stress early branding, was the right one. For the rapidly scrolling TikTok audience, attention is everything, and early branding is vital.