StudioTribe has been helping Frito Lay create impactful visuals for their packaging, point-of-sale & social media campaigns for many years. The goal, of course, is to inspire, evoke emotion & move product, yet the impact that the Smile with Lay’s campaign has made is one of the all-time greatest team efforts. First, THE CAUSE – for every purchase of Lay’s brand potato chips, a donation is made to Operation Smile, an international children’s medical charity that improves the lives of kids who suffer from cleft conditions through providing access to safe surgical care. The program originated in 2018 so Smile with Lay’s 2020 marks the third round of this eye-catching campaign.
Together, The Marketing Arm, one of Frito Lay’s agencies, & our team worked to come up with a stylized look for each “Smiler” that A.) looks great on packaging and B.) works great as a prop for consumer selfies with each smile fitting the shopper’s face regardless of package size. It’s just plain fun to try on the diverse variety of smiles – no wonder this campaign went viral!
Starting with photos taken by nationally-known photographers Jill Broussard & Cindy James, we developed an overall campaign style for the imagery that included increasing smile size, beauty retouching, adjusting facial symmetry, beard trimming, minor dental work, grain reduction, HDR and vibrance, color adjustments and adding enhanced portrait lighting.
Fast forward to early 2020, the program’s third run was successfully concepted and approved to begin. It involved bringing 40+ “Everyday Smilers” to Dallas for a photo shoot. “Everyday Smilers” are the designated people who bring smiles to children and who have made a difference in their communities through philanthropy, service &/or other endeavors. The shoot was slated for mid-March, just as the Coronavirus had begun to grip the nation, so TMA consulted with us for a new plan of action. Plan B was to send out a small photo crew to travel from city-to-city capturing the “Everyday Smilers” in their own environments – the thought being to reduce the health risk by reducing the number of people traveling. No sooner than the StudioTribe production crew had travel plans laid out, “shelter-in-place” orders were issued, and it was time for a Plan C. The team then decided, appropriately so, that the campaign should proceed ONLY if it could be done safely for everyone involved.
Plan C – Send out 40+ iPhones with detailed instructions on photo angles, focus, backgrounds and lighting so that the “Everyday Smilers” could photograph themselves and submit consistently shot imagery so that it would all ultimately look great on-package. Considering there would be over 80 different versions of packaging artwork produced, this, in itself, was no easy task. With everyone in agreement, iPhones were sent, “coached” selfies were taken & consistency measures were put in place as images were submitted. We then got to work our digital imaging magic, really bringing the “smiles” to life. See below for a few examples of the Smile with Lay’s 2020 campaign – Bags are in-store now so get your’s today & click here to learn more about the amazing “Everyday Smilers.”
