Shift+K+F+C
KFC Arabia
Issue 59 | June 2021
Agency
TBWA\RAAD
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer Walid Kanaan Executive Creative Director Bruno Bomediano Creative Director, Copywriter Alex Pineda Art Directors Mahesh Powar, Pedro Velasquez
Production Team
Motion Designer Camilo Rojas Arabic Editor Majdy Alawna Designers Mohammad Alkawas, Tatiana Kamal Developer Pradheep Nair
Other Credits
Strategic Planner Rifaat Fakih General Manager Joe Lahham Account Director John Abiad Account Manager Ashleigh Morgan Corporate Communications Director Romy Abdelnour
Date
January 2021
Background
KFC had dabbled with gamers and gaming, even designing a chicken-heating console. But the brand had yet to generate conversion with gamers. 350 million MENA gamers to be precise. A gold mine of sales if KFC was able to resonate with them. The challenge, then, was how to sell chicken to a target audience that didn’t even have time to check out an online menu?
Idea
First thoughts included setting up an in-game pop-up shop in Fortnite, invading Twitch streams with witty comments directing gamers to our website and inserting in-game redeemable coupons for finger-lickin’ good chicken.
Testing these ideas revealed that MENA gamers did not want their favourite games invaded by brands. This made the challenge even tougher. It was almost as tough as beating a game on “Hard” mode. Only mighty gamers were able to do so without cheat codes.
And that is when it all clicked. It was not about being present in-game, it was all about creating a real-life cheat code that would give gamers even more gaming time.
The idea was to do precisely that, a real-life cheat code to order finger-lickin’ good fried chicken.
Results
Launched in seven countries in the Middle East on a production budget of $0, the campaign accumulated 20 million social impressions from a reach of 1.7 million and an engagement of 350,000. There was +19% increase in online orders, 93% of those from the gaming community.
Our Thoughts
The rise and rise of gamers as an essential audience for brands has characterised recent issues of Directory with six campaigns aimed at them in Issue 58 and as many in this issue, (Save One Person, pages 38-39, Mobil, pages 54-55, League of Legends, pages 68-69, and Kiyan Prince Foundation, pages 96-97.) First of all, there are a lot of gamers out there. 350 million in MENA alone, 1.8 billion worldwide. Secondly, they are young. A Washington Post analysis claimed that 73% of 14-21-year-olds in the US identify as competitive gamers. If a brand can establish a relationship with them now, the lifetime value of the relationship could be colossal. Thirdly, games are happy to be media channels. And fourthly, gamers hate advertising passionately and are skilled at avoiding it. That makes them especially interesting to us because if brands want to engage as successfully as KFC has done here, they have to be witty or clever or both. And witty and clever is what we like on our pages.