Cheers chips launched its 'Share! Smile!' campaign in Ukraine in August 2024, created by Brain Tank, built around a single memorable gesture that reframes
ARCHIVECheers Chips Turns a Simple Gesture Into a Sharing Movement
Cheers chips launched the 'Share! Smile!' campaign in Ukraine in August 2024, created by Brain Tank, positioning a bag of chips as a trigger for generosity and social connection through a single replicable physical gesture.
The campaign centres on one precise moment: a person offers a single chip to a friend, pauses to let anticipation build, then reveals a second full bag fanned open like a peacock's tail — a visual flourish that signals abundance and playful generosity. That gesture, engineered by Brain Tank to be both instantly legible and easy to replicate, became the campaign's defining creative device. The slogan 'Share! Smile!' frames it not as a product promise but as a behavioural invitation, asking audiences across Ukraine to associate the Cheers brand with warmth and spontaneous connection rather than with flavour profiles or price positioning.
Brain Tank describes the strategic brief as a need to differentiate Cheers in a competitive Ukrainian snacks market where shelf presence and taste claims dominate category communication. The agency's answer was to bypass product-led messaging entirely and instead invest in a culturally transferable gesture — the kind of small, human act that earns memory through repetition rather than media weight alone. In Ukraine, where community and shared experience carry particular social resonance, the campaign's emotional register was deliberately calibrated to feel warm without being sentimental. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 57 out of 100, reflecting a strong conceptual foundation and clear brand idea, held back by limited documented reach and the absence of verified performance data.
ARCHIVECheers occupies a challenger position in the Ukrainian confectionery and snacks landscape. The brand competes in a category where larger, better-resourced players — including Lay's, distributed in Ukraine by PepsiCo, and regional market leader Flint — have historically dominated through scale, distribution breadth, and flavour-range advertising. Against that backdrop, Brain Tank identified that a small brand cannot win on product parity claims and instead pursued a strategy rooted in emotional differentiation, anchoring Cheers to the human behaviour of sharing rather than to any ingredient or taste attribute.
The strategic insight driving the campaign is both simple and durable: sharing food is one of the most universal social rituals, and chips — consumed collectively, passed around, eaten from a common bag — are already a sharing product by nature. Brain Tank's contribution was to make that implicit behaviour explicit and branded, giving it a specific gesture and a slogan that could travel beyond the television or digital screen and into everyday life in Ukraine. According to research published via Irbis-Nbuv Gov Ua, consumer decision-making in Ukrainian fast-moving consumer goods categories is strongly influenced by emotional brand associations, particularly among younger demographics — the precise audience that Cheers and campaigns built on lifestyle and friendship are designed to reach. The global savory-snacks market is estimated at between USD 258 billion and USD 286 billion in 2024 depending on methodology, according to GM Insights, SkyQuestt, and Data Bridge Market Research — a scale that underscores how intensely competitive the broader category context is, even as Cheers operates within the specific pressures of the Ukrainian market. Brain Tank had previously built the Cheers brand identity from scratch around a smile as its foundational emotional code, according to Braintank Ua, making 'Share! Smile!' a direct evolution of that established brand logic rather than a tonal departure.
Brain Tank constructed the entire creative execution around a single choreographed moment. The gesture — offering one chip before fanning open a second bag in a wide, peacock-tail arc — is designed to do three things simultaneously: surprise the recipient, signal generosity, and create a visual that is distinctive enough to own. The deliberate theatricality of the reveal transforms an ordinary snack into a small performance, and performances, unlike product shots, invite imitation.
The campaign was categorised as a design-led execution with two primary media assets, according to clapboard.com, suggesting a focused production approach that prioritised the integrity of the gesture over media volume. That restraint is itself a creative choice: when the central idea is a physical act meant to be replicated by real people in real social settings across Ukraine, overproducing the campaign risks aestheticising it into something aspirational rather than accessible. The creative team named in campaign documentation, as reported by Marketer Ua, includes Andrii Franchuk as Creative Director, Serhiy Maksymenko and Lada Kvitka as Art Directors, and Yevhen Artem'yev as Project Manager. Their collective decision to lead with gesture rather than dialogue or voiceover positions the 'Share! Smile!' campaign as something closer to a visual language than a traditional advertisement — a system that communicates without relying on a specific spoken language, which also gives it potential transferability across markets. Brain Tank had already applied a comparable approach for Cheers in Uzbekistan by May 2023, according to braintank.ua, where a campaign featuring blogger Liil Khuramov as protagonist was built on the same foundational smile-based brand code, demonstrating that the agency's creative methodology for Cheers is consistent and iterative across geographies.
No verified performance data for the Cheers 'Share! Smile!' campaign is publicly available. No published sales lift, market-share movement, brand-tracking metrics, or media reach figures have been confirmed for this execution in Ukraine, as noted across sources including clapboard.com and braintank.ua. Brain Tank's website references Effie Awards Ukraine 2024 in its agency credentials, but no verified award win, placement, or shortlist status has been confirmed for this specific campaign, according to the available public record.
What can be assessed structurally is the campaign's design for effectiveness. The gesture mechanic solves a persistent challenger-brand problem: how to generate earned attention and word-of-mouth without the media budget of a category leader. By encoding the brand idea into a physical behaviour — one that is easy to learn, visually distinctive, and socially legible — Brain Tank gave the 'Share! Smile!' campaign a replication pathway that operates independently of paid media exposure. For context, a comparable Brain Tank campaign for Cheers in Uzbekistan, featuring blogger Liil Khuramov, achieved a reported increase of eleven point six percent in top-of-mind awareness and a four point seven percent new consumer penetration retention rate, according to Iqads Ro — results that, while from a different geography, demonstrate the agency's capacity to produce measurable brand outcomes from emotionally driven Cheers campaigns. Whether the Ukraine execution achieved comparable lift remains undocumented, but the structural logic of the gesture-led approach is well-grounded in both the agency's prior work and in established principles of behavioural brand-building.
The Cheers 'Share! Smile!' campaign is a 2024 Ukrainian advertising initiative by Brain Tank. It centres on a branded gesture in which one chip is offered to a friend before a second bag is fanned open like a peacock's tail. The campaign positions Cheers chips as a symbol of generosity, connection, and shared joy rather than flavour or price.
Brain Tank created the Cheers 'Share! Smile!' campaign. The Kyiv-based agency had previously built the Cheers brand identity from scratch around a smile as its core emotional code, according to braintank.ua. Key credits include Creative Director Andrii Franchuk, Art Directors Serhiy Maksymenko and Lada Kvitka, and Project Manager Yevhen Artem'yev, as reported by marketer.ua.
The campaign launched in August 2024 in Ukraine. Brain Tank published the Cheers 'Share! Smile!' work as a design-led campaign with two primary media assets, according to clapboard.com. The launch followed earlier Cheers brand work Brain Tank had developed for the Uzbekistan market from at least May 2023, per braintank.ua.
The gesture is memorable because it is simple, surprising, and easy to replicate. Offering one chip before revealing a second bag fanned open like a peacock's tail creates a small visual performance that signals abundance. Brain Tank designed the gesture to travel beyond paid media by encouraging real audiences across Ukraine to repeat it in everyday social settings.
Cheers avoids flavour or price messaging entirely. Where competitors including Lay's and Flint rely on product-led category communication, Brain Tank positioned Cheers around a shareable human behaviour — the gesture of giving — making emotional differentiation the brand's primary competitive tool in the Ukrainian snacks market rather than product attributes or distribution scale.
No verified performance metrics or award wins are publicly confirmed for this campaign. Brain Tank's agency credentials reference Effie Awards Ukraine 2024, but no confirmed shortlist or win for this specific campaign exists in the public record, according to available sources. No sales lift or brand-tracking data for the Ukraine execution has been published.
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