A Bag Full of Luck

In Spain Pepsico’s Lay’s chips not only have a rather surprising Jamon flavor but also a rather surprising Bolsa de Suerte promotion. The “good luck bag” campaign dreamed up by Tiempo BBDO consists of little scratch cards in each of their bags of chips. With them you can either win a free bag of chips or cash. Pepsico are giving away 3,000,000 free bags of chips, which should say something about their margins on the stuff. The campaign, if my Spanish has not left me completely, aims at letting people who have never won anything win something. Free chips for losers seems like a winning proposition to me.

In addition to the chips you can also win one of 25,000 cash prizes of 10, 20, 50 and 100 Euros. The small amounts and the sheer number of prizes makes this campaign feel very different from other “buy our stuff and win something” promotions. Pepsico isn’t giving away a car or maybe/maybe not a Harrier Jump Jet this time. Instead Pepsi is running a national scratch card lotto with small cash prizes. The prizes are redeemed by sending an SMS to them. You then receive two SMS’s back one with a secret code and the other from Hal-Cash. You can then go to any ATM that supports the Hal-Cash system and get your money directly from the ATM using the secret code and reference number. This redemption system is the really breakthrough and innovative element to the campaign. You simply must have a look at the Hal-Cash online demo and the rest of their site, a triumph in interaction design.