How Frito-Lay and Rethink Rewrote a Holiday Ritual for Snack Fans
Frito-Lay's Share More Joy campaign is a 30-second holiday film created by Rethink and released across Canada and the United States in January 2024, inviting consumers to replace the traditional milk-and-cookies offering for Santa with Investor Pepsico.clapboard.com/archive/lays-unlimited-choices-food-drink">Lay's Classic potato chips, Doritos Nacho Cheese tortilla chips, or Cheetos Crunchy snacks.
The campaign launched in Canada during the week of December 4 through 10, 2023, according to agency communication dated December 12, 2023. Its archive publication date in both the United States and Canada is recorded as January 2024. Muse by Clios reported on December 11, 2023 that Share More Joy represented Rethink's first campaign for Frito-Lay Canada, framing the creative concept as a genuine reimagining of a deeply ingrained seasonal ritual rather than a straightforward product advertisement, according to Digitaledition Snackandbakery. That framing is central to the campaign's identity: the brand does not interrupt Christmas; it nudges one small moment within it, according to Foodbusinessnews.
The proposition is rooted in occasion-based marketing. Frito-Lay positions Share More Joy as a seasonal extension of the brand's broader philosophy around sharing, occasion, and joyful snacking rather than as the launch of an entirely new brand platform. In practical terms, the campaign asks families across the United States and Canada to consider what they place beside the fireplace on Christmas Eve and to treat that act of leaving a gift for Santa as an opportunity to express personality through snack choice. Lay's Classic, Doritos Nacho Cheese, and Cheetos Crunchy each carry distinct flavour identities, and the campaign allows consumers to project their household's preferences onto a universally recognised cultural moment. The Clapboard Score for Share More Joy is 55 out of 100, reflecting solid cultural relevance and a clear strategic hook tempered by limited documented campaign scale and modest measurable engagement in the public record.
Frito-Lay occupies a dominant position in the North American salty snack category. Lay's alone generated approximately 4.27 billion dollars in United States sales in 2024, up 3.8 percent year over year, according to data reported by Candy.tv. That figure contextualises Share More Joy not as an experimental brand play but as a campaign designed to defend and extend the category leadership Frito-Lay already holds across the United States and Canada during a period of intense seasonal consumer spending.
The savory snacks market globally was estimated at between 258 and 286 billion dollars in 2024 with a projected compound annual growth rate of 5.4 percent through 2030, according to Market Us. Within that broader context, the United States potato chip segment reached 11.1 billion dollars in 2024 sales, up 6 percent year over year, as reported by Candy.tv. Share More Joy enters this environment as a culturally specific push to capture holiday occasion spending in both Canada and the United States, where seasonal gifting and entertaining drive meaningful spikes in snack consumption. The campaign's strategic logic is that the holiday table — and the mantelpiece beside it — is contested retail territory.
Competing snack brands including Mondelez International, whose portfolio spans biscuits and confectionery with a strong seasonal presence, and Kellogg's Pringles, a direct rival in the shareable chips segment, both invest heavily in holiday creative across the United States and Canada. Frito-Lay's decision to focus the Share More Joy narrative on a single culturally loaded ritual — leaving food for Santa — rather than a broad seasonal message differentiates it from competitors that pursue wider emotional registers. The choice to foreground Doritos Nacho Cheese alongside Lay's Classic and Cheetos Crunchy also signals a multi-SKU strategy, using one campaign to lift visibility across three distinct product lines simultaneously.
Rethink built Share More Joy around a single, transferable creative idea. The agency's central device — replacing milk and cookies with a bowl of Frito-Lay snacks as an offering for Santa — works because it requires almost no explanation and carries genuine warmth without sentimentality. Muse by Clios noted the campaign's premise with approval upon its December 2023 launch, describing the concept as disarmingly simple and well-suited to the holiday advertising environment in Canada and the United States, where emotional resonance and speed of comprehension compete for attention in equal measure.
The execution is a 30-second film, the sole media asset documented in the campaign archive. That constraint — one film, one format — places full creative weight on the efficiency of the storytelling. The spot adopts a lifestyle genre approach, presenting the ritual of leaving snacks for Santa as a natural, cheerful family act rather than a comic subversion. This tonal choice is deliberate. An aggressively comic execution might have alienated the family-oriented viewers who form the primary audience for holiday snack advertising in Canada and the United States, while a purely sentimental approach would have undercut the playful brand voice that Lay's, Doritos Nacho Cheese, and Cheetos each carry individually.
Production credits for Share More Joy are not publicly documented in full. The campaign was developed by Rethink, which has built a reputation for culturally precise Canadian advertising work and whose appointment as Frito-Lay Canada's agency of record for this campaign was confirmed by Muse by Clios in December 2023. The 360-campaign characterisation noted in agency communication dated December 12, 2023 suggests the film anchored a broader media deployment, though the specific channels and executions beyond the hero film have not been publicly enumerated.
Public engagement data for Share More Joy is modest by platform standards. The campaign archive records 4,203 views, 17 likes, and 2 comments on the hosted asset. These figures reflect archival documentation rather than the full media delivery of a 360 campaign across Canada and the United States, and they should not be read as a proxy for total campaign reach. No verified broadcast audience data, paid media impressions, or sales-lift figures for Share More Joy are publicly available.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several attributes associated with effective holiday snack advertising. The single creative idea is immediately legible across age groups and household types in both Canada and the United States, which reduces friction in multi-platform deployment. The decision to feature three products — Lay's Classic, Doritos Nacho Cheese, and Cheetos Crunchy — within a single narrative increases the commercial utility of the film without fragmenting its creative focus. The lifestyle genre execution aligns with how families in Canada and the United States consume holiday content, privileging warmth and familiarity over spectacle.
Muse by Clios covered the campaign positively at launch, providing earned media credibility beyond paid placements. That coverage, combined with the 360-campaign rollout confirmed in agency communications, indicates Share More Joy was treated as a meaningful investment by both Frito-Lay and Rethink rather than a lightweight seasonal asset. The Clapboard Score of 55 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its core idea cleanly and occupies a defensible cultural space, while leaving room for deeper integration, broader creative extension, and more documented measurable impact.
Share More Joy is a 30-second holiday film created by Rethink for Frito-Lay. It launched in Canada in December 2023 and was published across Canada and the United States in January 2024. The campaign encourages consumers to leave Lay's, Doritos Nacho Cheese, or Cheetos Crunchy for Santa instead of traditional milk and cookies.
Rethink created Share More Joy for Frito-Lay. Muse by Clios confirmed in December 2023 that this was Rethink's first campaign for Frito-Lay Canada. The agency is known for culturally precise advertising work and developed the campaign around a single, instantly legible holiday creative idea centered on snack-based gifting rituals.
Share More Joy features three Frito-Lay products: Lay's Classic potato chips, Doritos Nacho Cheese tortilla chips, and Cheetos Crunchy snacks. All three are positioned as alternatives to the traditional milk-and-cookies offering left for Santa, allowing the single film to serve a multi-product commercial purpose across the United States and Canada.
Share More Joy launched in Canada during the week of December 4 through 10, 2023, according to agency communication. Its formal archive publication covers both Canada and the United States in January 2024. Agency documentation from December 12, 2023 described the Canadian rollout as a 360 campaign, indicating deployment across multiple channels.
Share More Joy received a Clapboard Score of 55 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's clear strategic hook and culturally resonant creative idea, balanced against limited publicly documented campaign scale and modest archival engagement data. The assessment is based on Clapboard's editorial evaluation of creative effectiveness and structural campaign merit.
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