Overview
You know that orange stuff on your fingers after eating Cheetos®? That’s called Cheetle. Our cool cats teamed up with Chester the Cheetah and Frito-Lay to build a cheetle detector web app to determine whether you’ve eaten Cheetos recently and if so, unlock a top-secret experience with Puerto Rican superstar, Bad Bunny.
The Problem
“The client approached us looking for a novel way to tell if someone recently ate Cheetos. We knew scanning a barcode, entering a unique number, or even taking a photo of the bag could accomplish this. However, our client felt strongly that anyone eating Cheetos should be able to participate–regardless of whether or not they had access to the bag or the receipt.
To make this engagement especially challenging, we had a very tight turnaround to imagine and build this application before the campaign TV spot aired during Super Bowl LIV. Not knowing the level of the promotion the application would get, we had to plan for the biggest outcome by ensuring dramatic scalability and security.”
Our Solution
We came up with a custom mobile web app that used computer vision and augmented reality to scan fingers, look for orange-dusted fingers, and then if positive, plop the user into a lead gen form to purchase exclusive merch.
Much like Cheetos, we broke the computer vision detection portion of this development into digestible chunks. We first built and trained a machine learning model to ensure a hand was in the picture (and not flipping the bird!) Then, we tapped friends and family with hands of all shapes, sizes, and colors across the country to eat mountains of Cheetos and send us selfies of their Cheetle-crusted hands…and yes, that text required a lot of explaining.
After about a month, we ended up with tens of thousands of orange finger photos. Once we had a working API, it was time to design the mobile user interface. We had a lot of control over the experience and our client gave us some leeway with their brand guidelines. The end result was a mobile-first web app built using Next.js that loaded lightning fast and scaled incredibly well using Google Cloud.
This project went on to win Grand Prix at Cannes Lions, The One Show, The Webby Awards, ADC Awards, D&AD, and The ANDY Awards.
