KFC
It’s finger-lickin’ good! Worked for KFC for over 64 years but it certainly didn’t work anymore in 2020. In response to Covid-19 KFC decided to suspend its slogan on all global advertising for a little while. But you know what they say about life and lemons…
KFC: How KFC pressed pause on the world’s most inappropriate endline
Challenge
It’s finger-lickin’ good! Worked for KFC for over 64 years but it certainly didn’t work anymore in 2020. In response to Covid-19 KFC decided to suspend its slogan on all global advertising for a little while. But you know what they say about life and lemons…
The Big Idea
Rather than hide from this reality, KFC decided to face it head-on, with a campaign announcing the standing down of the famous line until better days. This is big news. OK, not important news like Covid and elections, but certainly newsworthy. So we treated it like news: big announcement, in public for social proofing, engaging through multiple touchpoints and tying in social and PR.
Delivery
The media strategy needed to be bold. This was big news after all. So we decided to treat it like the big announcement it was and apply the principles of major public information campaigns:
- Go hard, early: We pioneered in a total social take over using TikTok and Twitter.
- Be public: Big news, is public news. To spread the message, we used real time news-signal targeting on Twitter.
- Long tail: Finally, we ensured the buzz didn’t drop off, with a sophisticated retargeting strategy.
Results
The campaign was a massive success for KFC. This was the first time we pioneered in a total social media take over across 5 apps and reached over 34.2M people in under 48 hours. We over-delivered 10x on the planned engagement.