The Frito-Lay brand continues to spread smiles around the nation with its second year of “Everyday Smilers,” the cause-driven marketing campaign. It notes it will donate $1 million to Operation Smile organization which helps provide surgeries to children born with cleft conditions. This year’s initiative will launch on July 28, when special bags of Traditional, Wavy, Lightly Salted, Poppables and Kettle-Cooked Lay’s will appear in stores.
The social media campaign was brought to life by The Marketing Arm agency and is being built on the success of last year’s #SmileWithLays. It’s driven by consumer personalization (which is expected to be the prime driver of marketing success in the next five years) and banks on the younger, social media savvy audiences, such as Gen Z and millenials, who are heavily engaged on social and known for their backing of cause-driven marketing.
According to the company, last year’s effort resulted in 700 selfies posted daily (during an 8-week run) which featured users smiling alongside bags of the brand’s products. The featured hashtag generated more than 30,000 tweets and 10,000 Instagram posts during the eight-week period. Also, a special Snapchat filter with 21 seconds of play time saw 2.8 million shares. Operation Smile content produced on Facebook received a 14 percent engagement rate, which is 12 points above the industry average.
Lay’s spokesperson also told Marketing Dive that the initiative will be supported with TV ads and the personal stories of the “Everyday Smilers” participants will “be revealed” in the upcoming weeks.
Besides doing a good deed, the company, of course, gets a pleasant bonus in the form of user-generated content on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook
