KFC: Colonel KI
KFC gained 70 minutes of brand exposure per day, which was 4x more vs planned. Bringing the brand to over 203 million game watchers.
Challenge
KFC’s objective was simple: go beyond sponsorships to make KFC an integral part of League of Legends (LOL), the world’s most popular eSport with roughly 111 million players in China alone.
Idea
Predicting the winner for fans was the only way for KFC to be truly integral to the experience and the Colonel was the perfect persona to deliver this. KFC partnered with data company to create an algorithm based on all historical data and real-time data for each team, and made the algorithm in the form of Colonel KI. For eSports, real-time performance data is important for an audience to really understand the game’s current situation. KFC added value from start to finish as all gamers and fans could track the predictions before, during and after the matches.
Insight
Esports games like LOL have many more numbers than a typical ball game: Win ratios. Gold collected. Magic stats. Attack damage. But with all these numbers churned out in real time, fans and sports commentators often rely on gut feel and sheer excitement to predict the winner. KFC saw this as the biggest opportunity to address an unmet need and elevate fan experience.
Delivery
Colonel KI’s predictions were featured on the game screen. During each live game, a Colonel KI graph at the bottom of the screen appeared to show real-time win rates (pointing to the team who is likely to win). Fans could also log into the KFC app to track the predictions, even check detailed data to understand more about what’s going on in the arena down to the most micro of stats. At the most exciting moments of the game, Colonel KI distributed KFC coupons to all fans – inviting them to order KFC online and enjoy fried chicken during the game.
Results
KFC gained 70 minutes of brand exposure per day, which was 4x more vs planned. Bringing the brand to over 203 million game watchers. More than 1.9 million KFC specific comments were generated during the game. On one of China’s biggest social media platform Weibo, KFC topic views reached 35 million organically – 2X more than the most viewed Weibo topic from this year’s World Cup brand sponsors. 100% of coupons were taken (vs the average rate of 3%), and 25% redeemed – 25X the average promotion!