Thierry Henry surprised Barcelona soccer fans at home on game day, but left if they had no Lay’s chips

Celebrities surprising fans is an age-old marketing trick, but done right, it still works nicely, as we saw on the Super Bowl. You don’t even really need a concept—see, for example, David Beckham’s popular photo-booth stunt from the 2012 Olympics—but things can get a lot more interesting when you do. Lay’s is out with a fun video from Slap Global that combines a top athlete with a fun if slightly sadistic idea. To launch their UEFA Champions League sponsorship, they got retired French soccer star Thierry Henry—who won the Champions League with Barcelona in 2009—to surprise Barça fans at home on game day, asking to watch a match with them. The caveat: They had to have Lay’s chips on hand, or he was off to the next house. Henry is a magnetic presence on his own, but the video is made so much better by the panic of the fans as they rummage through their homes in search of Lay’s. The guy who returns with two small potatoes, promising to make chips from scratch, is a highlight that Henry finds hysterical, too. Ending the video on the fans who lost out isn’t the conventional approach either, but those are some of the best clips in the whole thing. Documentarian Andrew Lane directed the stunt. Slap co-founders Maxi Itzkoff and Gerry Graf told Ad Age that the fan reactions were the focus—“most importantly, how they went from the highest high to the lowest low if they had no Lay’s in the house, therefore missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime.” The spot launches the new “No Lay’s No Game” platform. They shot with three cameras, to get enough angles, in a neighborhood near Barcelona so they could easily walk from one house to another. The live stunt has been replicated with Dutch women’s star Lieke Martens in Amsterdam for a future spot, and is going to take place in South Africa and Chile as well. Slap president Lyndsey Corona said team members in New York, Buenos Aires and Madrid collaborated on the project with Lay’s execs in the U.S. and U.K., proving the value of the agency’s flexible global model.

Thierry Henry surprised Barcelona soccer fans at home on game day, but left if they had no Lay’s chips

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