Lay's Grab the Moments Brings Messi and an Invisible Ball to American Screens
Lay's 'Grab the Moments' is a 2022 United States television campaign created by OMD, anchored to the UEFA Champions League, in which a group of friends continue a street soccer game using an imaginary ball after a dog steals the real one, culminating in an encounter with Lionel Messi on the other side of a fence.
The hero spot premiered in the United States on February 15, 2022, according to records documented by Clapboard. Its central mechanic is elegantly simple: one girl eats a Lay's chip, sparks an idea, and begins dribbling an invisible ball through the city streets. Her friends join the illusion. The sequence builds until the imaginary ball clears a fence and lands at the feet of Messi, who snacks from his own bag of Lay's before passing the unseen ball back to her with a grin. The tagline anchoring the campaign is 'Stay Golden.'
The campaign serves as the US launch vehicle for Lay's broader UEFA Champions League sponsorship platform. As reported by Darkhorses, the integrated effort expanded globally in early March 2022 and ultimately ran across more than 60 markets worldwide. In the United States specifically, the spot positions Lay's not merely as a snack but as a catalyst for creativity and collective spontaneity — a brand truth the 'Grab the Moments' narrative dramatises rather than declares. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 69 out of 100, reflecting solid creative craft and strong cultural alignment with the growing US soccer audience, balanced against limited documented award recognition.
Lay's partnership with UEFA Champions League reflects a deliberate read of the shifting US sports landscape. Soccer is the fastest-growing major sport among younger American demographics, a momentum that the 2022 cycle of Champions League broadcasting across US networks made commercially significant for snack brands seeking access to engaged, passion-driven audiences.
The strategic insight underpinning 'Grab the Moments' is that sports function as a universal social adhesive. OMD and Lay's built the campaign around the observation that the rituals surrounding sport — gathering, playing, snacking, improvising — carry as much emotional weight as the sport itself. The invisible ball device externalises that insight: it is not the equipment that creates the moment, it is the willingness of people to participate together. A Lay's chip, the narrative argues, is the trigger for that willingness.
In the United States, the broader savory snacks category is intensely competitive. The global savory-snacks market was estimated at approximately 260 billion US dollars in 2022, according to Blog Tapresearch, a figure that underscores the scale of the battlefield on which Lay's competes. Within PepsiCo's 2022 portfolio, snack products were heavily concentrated in the savory segment, according to PepsiCo's own reported figures. Lay's primary competitive pressure comes from brands including Pringles, owned by Kellogg's, and Cape Cod, both of which contest the same US salty-snack shopper. Kellogg's savory snack lines represented a substantial portion of that company's total snack sales, as documented by Scribd analysis of the category. Against that context, Lay's use of Messi — the most globally recognised footballer of his generation — and a UEFA platform gives the brand a scale and cultural authority that product-focused snack advertising cannot easily replicate.
The 'Grab the Moments' film is directed by Traktor, the Swedish collective known for comedic precision and kinetic performance work, through production company Stink Films, as documented by Clapboard. The choice of Traktor is significant. Their directing signature — tight ensemble choreography, naturalistic comic timing, and the ability to make physical performance feel spontaneous rather than staged — is exactly what the invisible ball conceit demands.
The creative execution hinges on a performance problem that is genuinely difficult: actors must convince an audience that an object exists when it does not. Traktor solves this by grounding every participant's physicality in specificity. Each child's reaction to the imaginary ball is distinct — a toe-poke here, a header's anticipatory crouch there — which gives the illusion its texture. The city environment is used as an active participant in the narrative rather than a backdrop, with the ball's invisible trajectory threading through real urban geography before clearing the fence that separates the children from Messi.
Lionel Messi's performance is calibrated carefully. He does not appear as a polished celebrity endorser but as a fellow snacker who happens to be on the other side of the fence, equally delighted by the game. The exchange of the invisible ball — his pass back to the girl — is the emotional peak of the spot, and it lands because Messi's physical commitment to the fiction matches the children's. Lieke Martens also appeared in wider elements of the global campaign, as reported by Darkhorses, broadening the football credibility of the platform beyond its most famous face. The campaign's agency was OMD, with the broader creative underpinned by a 'Stay Golden' brand platform that Lay's has used as a unifying creative spine across multiple markets.
The YouTube asset for 'Grab the Moments', dated April 12, 2022, recorded 3,903,136 views, 574 likes, and 47 comments, according to archive records documented by Clapboard. Those figures represent organic platform engagement for a single video asset tied to a campaign that also ran across paid television and broader digital media in the United States and more than 60 markets globally, as reported by Darkhorses.
No verified award wins for 'Grab the Moments' are publicly documented across Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, according to Clapboard's research. The absence of award recognition does not diminish the campaign's structural effectiveness. The invisible ball device is an inherently shareable creative idea — it is visual, universal, and requires no language to land, which explains the decision to extend it across more than 60 markets. The Messi casting aligns the brand with a figure whose cultural reach in the United States was intensifying in 2022 as domestic soccer interest accelerated ahead of the 2026 World Cup cycle.
For context on the US campaign environment, ispot.tv records confirm the February 2022 launch window for the television spot in the United States, a period when Lay's was simultaneously running its 'Golden Memories' Super Bowl campaign starring Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen, as noted by People. Running two high-profile campaigns in the same month demonstrates the scale of Lay's media investment in the United States during early 2022 and contextualises 'Grab the Moments' as a sustained brand offensive rather than a single activation. The Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its creative premise with confidence and cultural intelligence, held back primarily by the lack of independently verified performance outcomes beyond view counts.
Lay's 'Grab the Moments' is a 2022 US television spot created by OMD for the UEFA Champions League. It follows a group of friends who play soccer with an imaginary ball after a dog steals the real one, culminating in a playful encounter with Lionel Messi, who passes the invisible ball back while snacking on Lay's.
The film was directed by Traktor, the Swedish directing collective, through production company Stink Films. Traktor's reputation for kinetic ensemble performance and comedic physical precision made them a strong creative fit for the invisible ball conceit at the heart of the campaign, as documented by Clapboard.
Lionel Messi appeared in the hero US film, while Lieke Martens featured in wider elements of the global campaign, according to Darkhorses. The dual casting gave Lay's men's and women's football credibility across the UEFA Champions League platform, which ran in more than 60 markets worldwide in 2022.
The campaign's YouTube asset recorded 3,903,136 views, 574 likes, and 47 comments, according to archive records documented by Clapboard. These figures reflect organic platform engagement for a single asset within a broader paid campaign that ran across US television and international markets throughout early 2022.
OMD created 'Grab the Moments' for Lay's, with the hero television spot launching in the United States on February 15, 2022, according to Clapboard. The broader global campaign expanded in early March 2022 and ultimately ran across more than 60 markets as part of Lay's UEFA Champions League sponsorship platform.
No verified award wins for 'Grab the Moments' are publicly documented across Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, according to Clapboard's research. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100, reflecting strong creative execution against limited independently verified outcomes.
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