Working with Veryfi’s technology has been a great experience. They provide effective and flexible solutions for our campaigns across all channels. This year we’re launching our third campaign with Veryfi, reflecting the trust and positive results we’ve achieved.
Diancarlo Rodriguez – Category Manager Milk and Dairy Beverages – Grupo Inlacsa
1. Executive Summary
In July 2025, LALA Guatemala partnered with Veryfi to launch ‘Gana con Lala,’ a promotional campaign unlike anything the company had attempted before. For two months, consumers across the country could win prizes ranging from pizza vouchers to all-inclusive international trips simply by purchasing LALA products and submitting a photo through WhatsApp. Behind the scenes, however, the campaign had to solve challenges that would normally require multiple vendors: onboarding consumers, validating entries, distributing prizes, and defending against fraud.
Veryfi delivered an end-to-end solution that handled all of it. By combining a custom WhatsApp bot, OCR engine, and Veryfi Lens for secure image capture, we created a consumer journey that was seamless for participants yet highly controlled for LALA. More than 10,000 Guatemalan consumers engaged with the campaign, and all 30,000 entries were tracked, validated, and protected in real time. This wasn’t just about giving away prizes, it was about proving that large-scale consumer engagement in Latin America can be done digitally, securely, and at speed.
2. Company Background
LALA Guatemala (Productos Lácteos de Centroamérica, S.A.) is a subsidiary of Grupo LALA, one of the largest dairy companies in Latin America. With deep distribution networks and a portfolio of household staples, LALA holds a strong position in the Guatemalan market. But dairy is a crowded and competitive category. Brands compete not only on product quality and pricing, but also on how well they can connect directly with consumers.
In this environment, promotional campaigns are more than just short-term sales drivers, they are a way to reinforce brand loyalty and gather insights on consumer behavior. LALA recognized that traditional promotions, often based on paper receipts or manual verification, could no longer meet the scale or security required. To stand out, they needed a campaign that was easy for consumers to join, immune to fraud, and capable of producing data they could use for future strategy. That need is what brought them to Veryfi.
3. Campaign Challenge
Designing a campaign of this size came with multiple layers of difficulty. First, the campaign had to reach adult consumers across the entire country, many of whom interact with brands primarily through mobile devices. That meant the consumer experience had to be simple, fast, and available through a channel people already used daily. WhatsApp was the natural choice, but WhatsApp alone doesn’t provide the controls needed to guarantee campaign integrity.
The second challenge was fraud prevention. When prizes as valuable as international trips or large digital payouts are at stake, bad actors will attempt to exploit loopholes. LALA wanted complete assurance that prizes would go only to legitimate participants.
The third challenge involved scale and complexity. With tens of thousands of entries expected, the campaign needed real-time validation and tracking. In addition, the prize structure itself was diverse: from small instant digital payouts, to vouchers redeemable in restaurants, all the way to international travel packages. Each type of reward had to be managed seamlessly without creating bottlenecks.
Finally, LALA’s team wanted visibility into what was happening. They needed a dashboard that showed participation trends, flagged suspicious behavior, and gave them actionable insights while the campaign was still running, not just after it had ended.
These requirements set the stage for a technology-driven approach that traditional promotion vendors simply couldn’t provide.
4. Veryfi Team & the work we did for LALA
From the very beginning, Veryfi’s role went far beyond supplying an OCR engine. We designed and implemented the entire campaign experience from the ground up. This meant creating a custom WhatsApp bot that handled every step of the consumer journey, from initial registration to final notifications. The bot was simple enough that anyone with WhatsApp could participate, yet powerful enough to handle thousands of parallel interactions without downtime. On the backend, we built and tuned an OCR pipeline specifically to handle handwritten four-digit codes. These codes varied in handwriting style and lighting conditions, but our engine was robust enough to validate them instantly with a high degree of accuracy. To guarantee image authenticity, we replaced WhatsApp’s default camera with Veryfi Lens, deployed via App Clips on iOS and Instant Apps on Android. By doing this, we controlled the capture pipeline end-to-end, ensuring images were not only higher quality but also impossible to fake. On top of that, we integrated directly with prize distribution partners through secure APIs, so once a submission passed validation, rewards could be issued in real time without manual intervention.
5. Anti-Fraud Technology Features
Protecting campaign integrity was non-negotiable. In promotions of this scale, fraud attempts are inevitable, and without proper defenses, they can quickly erode both budgets and brand trust. We addressed this by embedding multiple layers of fraud prevention into the system. Every photo had to be taken live through Veryfi Lens, which eliminated the possibility of recycled or edited images slipping through. Device fingerprinting allowed us to recognize when multiple suspicious accounts were being generated from the same phone, while LCD detection blocked attempts to photograph validation codes off a computer screen. Beyond that, we captured metadata around submissions, location information, time stamps, and behavioral patterns, which gave us the ability to detect coordinated fraud rings. All of these safeguards operated quietly in the background. For the participant, the process felt smooth and immediate. For the brand, it meant every win was legitimate and the campaign’s credibility remained intact.
6. User Experience & Participation Flow
While the technical infrastructure was complex, the consumer experience was deliberately simple. A participant only had to buy a product, scan a QR code or send a WhatsApp message, register with a few quick details, and then write the validation code next to the batch number on the packaging. From there, they snapped a live photo with Veryfi Lens and received an instant notification telling them whether they had won. In practice, the entire process took less than a minute. This immediacy was critical to keeping consumers engaged, people didn’t feel like they were sending information into a black box; they saw results right away. Behind the scenes, our technology handled code validation, fraud checks, and data logging, but to the consumer it felt effortless.
7. Prize Structure & Distribution
The reward system was carefully designed to sustain excitement over the campaign’s two-month run. At the top tier were eight all-inclusive international trips, large aspirational prizes that generated buzz both on social media and through word of mouth. At the same time, thousands of smaller rewards, over eight thousand instant cash coupons delivered digitally through the ZIGI app and more than a thousand Domino’s vouchers, kept participation levels high on a daily basis. By mixing these different tiers of rewards and staggering redemption windows, the campaign maintained a steady rhythm. Participants were motivated by the possibility of winning something substantial, while the frequency of smaller wins kept people coming back day after day.
8. Real-Time Analytics & Management
For LALA’s team, transparency into how the campaign was performing was just as important as consumer engagement. Through the Veryfi campaign management portal, brand managers could monitor entries as they happened, track geographic distribution of participants, and see which products were driving the highest levels of engagement. Fraud alerts surfaced in real time, allowing the team to react quickly if suspicious patterns emerged. The portal also became the primary tool for handling participant complaints and questions, since managers could instantly pull up a user’s submission history and see exactly what had been validated or flagged. The combination of live oversight and historical analytics gave LALA a level of control they hadn’t had in previous promotions. It was no longer a matter of waiting until the end of the campaign to understand what worked; they had actionable insights from day one.
9. Key Benefits Achieved
By the time the campaign closed, the benefits were clear. LALA had succeeded in reaching consumers nationwide through a channel, WhatsApp, that people were already comfortable using daily. Fraud attempts were detected and stopped before they could impact the results, preserving both the budget and consumer trust. Operationally, the entire initiative ran more smoothly than a traditional promotion would have, thanks to automation and the consolidation of multiple processes into a single platform. Most importantly, the campaign produced more than just winners; it generated a wealth of consumer data that LALA can use to shape future marketing efforts. Participation patterns, behavioral trends, and geographic insights all became part of a playbook that will inform how the company approaches promotions going forward. What started as a two-month giveaway ended as a foundation for a new way of engaging consumers in the region.
10. Technology Partnership Value
The success of “Gana con LALA” came down to the value of having one technology partner manage the campaign end-to-end. With Veryfi, LALA didn’t need to coordinate between multiple vendors for bots, OCR, fraud prevention, and prize distribution. Instead, they had a single system where every component, from code capture to payout, was integrated and optimized to work together. That integration mattered not just for execution but also for trust: LALA could be confident that every consumer touchpoint was secure, every entry was validated fairly, and every prize was distributed with accountability. Our AI-powered validation ensured authenticity, our fraud-prevention stack safeguarded brand reputation, and our WhatsApp-first design met consumers exactly where they were. For LALA, the campaign wasn’t just about one promotion, it was proof that large-scale consumer engagement can be done digitally, securely, and at speed. And for Veryfi, it demonstrated the unique value of delivering not just tools, but complete solutions that scale with our partners’ ambitions.
Get in touch with us today to learn how you can power your next loyalty campaign with Veryfi!
