AltKFC - the first alternative restaurant inspired by KFC brand mythology, AltKFC web-series launch

Golin Romania, MRM Romania, UM Romania

THE CONTEXT The story of KFC Romania started 25 years ago, reaching at this point 94 restaurants. KFC became one of the top QSR brands on the local market that welcomes tens of thousands of clients daily in its restaurants across the country. Locally, the brand’s essence is translated through authenticity (“#bereal, not perfect”). This reflects not only in products and services, but mostly in the way KFC designs its communication campaigns. THE INISGHT The story of branded content starts in 2018, when KFC decided to launch a long-term concept-platform, Social Entertainment Channel (SEC), which is meant to connect KFC with the youngsters by delivering its brand philosophy through a digital content-driven, but always-innovative approach. Social Entertainment Channel was launched two years ago with SOCIALME, a plea for being your true self and not sacrificing reality to conquer social media fame. The series’ main point was, simply put, #bereal, not perfect! Fast forward to 2020 – we count FRIENDZONE, Garlic Sauce Test, RANDOM, The CROPPERS – different forms of KFC storytelling content, all having in common the brand philosophy. The next big content campaign needed to reassert KFC’s credo and tighten the connection with the consumers starting from a business necessity – communicating the “freshly prepared” attribute while using the SEC platform as an entertainment hook. OBJECTIVES Since the other projects were a big success, the new brand communication effort needed to take things to the next level and reach 2 objectives: entertain but also inform customers. KFC couldn’t afford being repetitive or boring. The challenge the brand faces when reaching the young target is to engage and stop it from scrolling through social feeds by using branded content as a centrepiece. Because other players on the market started to use this type of approach as well, the brand needed to introduce innovation to deliver an enticing narrative. And it’s not easy to bring novelty to KFC’s brand speech about authenticity and make it stick to people’s minds. Our brand objectives were to boost brand love, brand trust, relevancy, distinctiveness, and active involvement scores while increasing the “freshly prepared” attribute. In terms of communication objectives, our goal was to create credibility for “freshly prepared” attribute. From a storytelling content perspective, the obvious benchmark was The CROPPERS – the last KFC series meant to promote the brand philosophy. While CROPPERS was a hit, we set out to create an even more enticing series that would reach and engage even more people. We wanted to use multiple, but fit channels (mainly social media, but also event and PR Blitz tactics), partners (influencers & media) and a fit format (mockumentary) to disseminate the key messages to our target and create freshness and quality associations in mass media and social media by generating visibility and penetration regarding our products. This forced KFC to perform a guerrilla campaign with a new creative content used to tell the brand’s story and engage audiences, but now from the freshness perspective. RESEARCH From a brand perspective, KFC stands for authenticity and realness as opposed to simulated perfection. The authenticity stems directly from KFC’s core product: the fried chicken which always comes from local producers and is prepared by specialized cooks in KFC restaurants following Colonel Sanders’ secret recipe. It’s basically fresh, authentic chicken. Nothing obscure, fake, or artificial about it. However, not everyone seems to know that. In the last years we saw an increased interest in social media for topics correlated with the KFC business. Just to mention a few, our consumers were saying that products aren’t fresh, we use frozen chicken, too much oil that never gets changed and so on. We wanted to test this, so we first started an open conversation on our Instagram page asking consumers to truly speak about the brand myths, for International Sincerity Day (7th of August). Based on the qualitative findings of the online activation, we moved on to a quantitative approach - trying to isolate the most powerful and widely spread KFC related myths on a sample of 500 respondents (research conducted by a specialized agency). The results? 80% of the Romanians believe that the chicken is frozen. 70% of the Romanians believe that the chicken is imported. 50% of the Romanians believe that the chicken is cooked by machines. 50% of the Romanians believe that the oil is old. As a brand that stands for authenticity and realness, KFC decided to explore these “hot” insights, by focusing on the idea of an “alternative” restaurant inspired by KFC brand mythology. Based on these not-so-comfortable findings and the Romanian pop-culture verbatim “The client is always right”, we decide to go for an extreme test and see how a KFC restaurant, where the client is always right (in its misbeliefs), would look like. These misconceptions were likely hurting the brand and needed to be fought and corrected. And the brand has done this in the past as well, but only using traditional communication and PR. STRATEGY AltKFC* is a campaign centered on an experimental production that tackles & demolishes the most popular myths regarding the KFC chicken, as revealed by research. It’s meant to create credibility for “freshly prepared” attribute and demonstrate that the chicken KFC uses for its iconic recipes is coming from local suppliers, always fresh and prepared according to highest quality & safety standards by specialized staff. In order to bring a fresh approach to how we use content, we looked for a completely new type of format that was never used before under KFC’s Social Entertainment content platform – we decided that a mockumentary would best fit our campaign’s needs. And on top, it was the first brand mockumentary ever created in Romania. *In Romanian, Alt means something different. Therefore, playing with wording we managed to represent the absurd universe of an AltKFC restaurant, full of myths, facing the #real reality of the KFC restaurants and philosophy. IMPLEMENTATION AltKFC documents the story of Alin Puiu, a former KFC intern with entrepreneurial aspirations that sets out to open his own version of a KFC restaurant inspired by some of the most common myths he finds online. These, he suspects, are the true secrets of KFC’s chicken which he hopes to replicate in his own restaurant. So, during the 4 episodes, we follow him trying to import chicken all the way from Kentucky, print it in 3D, look for cooks who could turn Romanian chicken into American one and even try to buy used oil and unsold chicken from KFC. Puiu’s attempts to cook his version of KFC chicken ultimately fail as all the myths prove to be false. During his journey, Puiu encounters real people & actual KFC employees. To drive the mockumentary approach, their interactions are unscripted, spontaneous, and completely realistic. The series is made of four episodes that rolled out online weekly on YouTube (the main broadcast platform) and were promoted on the brand’s other social channels with short extra pieces of content that added to the campaign’s story (testimonials with the KFC employees, funny extra bits of content with Nicu etc). The content was part of the media channels push as well, be it in special projects with PROTV/Libertatea (well-known Romanian online outlets) or triggering reactions on platforms such as Snapchat & TikTok. Also, to further drive awareness for the freshness attributes, in parallel we ran a campaign with “classic” #pebune messages about the KFC chicken – on KFC Facebook and Instagram channels. The debunking of the episode’s myths was strengthened by these messages, creating an antithesis between what Puiu wanted to prove and real life. THE FORMAT In terms of episodes’ structure, we had a strong storyline: visit the myth, visit a KFC just to see the myth is false, try to find solutions to turn the myth into reality, fail & postpone the grand opening of the AltKFC restaurant. A low-budget high-entertainment Borat, where all the episodes have an amateurish, daily vlog look and feel. Some scenes were shot by Alin Puiu, with a fixed camera. It will be a mix of scripted scenes and real interactions, with real people. The latter will happen freely. INTEGRATED CAMPAIGN AltKFC was developed with an interesting storyline, a teasing phase, social media dedicated content, innovative influencer activations, all prepared in detail for the unexpected special event that revealed the KFC Freshness Campaign. Media storytelling - Alin Puiu, plans to develop a revolutionary KFC restaurant concept inspired by all the fake news circulating online - based on the premise "The customer is always right". Alin Puiu documents his approach on his Facebook page (a dedicated content channel used to deliver backdated content in parallel with the series script). While building his project, Alin nurtures a direct communication thread with the media (Libertatea and PROTV, two important media outlets in Romania) which publish interviews with him. Digital platform - This duality of #pebune & #perfect was also presented on the landing page of the campaign. When users first got to https://www.kfc.ro/puipebune/, they were greeted with the #pebune freshness messages. If they pressed the “ALT” key of their keyboard, they would be transported into Puiu’s AltKFC world. PR Blitz - Puiu’s invitation at the event was as clumsy as possible, packed in a creative PR Blitz: a simple card with the location of the event, a KFC bucket marked with a marker, one hand-branded balloon and an audio message from Alin Puiu himself. Following the activation, over 16 influencers posted more than 50 social media materials (Instagram Stories, FB posts and IG posts) about Alin Puiu and AltKFC, the new restaurant in town. Special event - The climax of the campaign was the special event to mark the launch of Puiu’s restaurant, since that’s the story we said to everyone: media, influencers, announcing it also via a dedicated Facebook event. Although Alin Puiu's dream seems to be falling apart, he does not lose his confidence and begins to organize the great, in fact the huge opening of the most revolutionary restaurant in Southeast Europe - AltKFC - where he invites several influencers and journalists to join him. The event turned out to be a 3-in-1 concept – a restaurant opening which in fact was a great closure of a failed restaurant idea, but hey, we had KFC products, of course (food service layer), a series preview (entertainment layer) and a press conference revealing the truth about the campaign and about the freshness attributes of KFC (informative layer). Over 60 curious influencers and journalists showed up at the event where they were able to see the 4 episodes of the newest and freshest KFC branded content series – AltKFC mockumentary – and also experience a branded pop-up store. Hosted by Alin Puiu himself assisted by KFC representatives and the agencies, the event presented the results of the study and broadcasted the preview of the entire series. Pop-up store for general audience - After the press conference, the AltKFC space remained a consumer experience space where KFC fans & sceptics were invited to watch the mockumentary in a special set-up (“believe it or not" thematic décor) and discover myths and most of all, realities about KFC. The pop-up store was set-up in Bucharest, capital city of Romania, and was opened for 4 days. Influencers - Another innovation for this integrated campaign was the creative collaboration with influencers that, this time, had a double layering, they were engaged as both content creators and supporting characters. Marian Ionescu (Mariciu) and Maria Zvinca – well known Romanian influencers brought extra flavour to the script with their presence in the mockumentary as actors. RESULTS The series episodes achieved a total of over 3.5m views in YouTube. Within the media campaign, the full videos achieved an average CTR of 0.79%, with the last episode achieving a record 1.6% CTR. Compared to the benchmark – The Croppers series – AltKFC proved more engaging in pretty much all the key metrics. Considering a similar timeframe (the full episodes broadcast period plus a three-week aftermath), AltKFC achieved: • 228% more shares compared to the previous series • 109% more likes • 57% more comments • 228% subscribers gained on the KFC channel • 148% more total unique viewers • +44% total watch time The launch event was attended by over 60 influencers and journalists who posted about 70 Instagram Stories with a reach of 85,000 accounts. The collaboration with the 4 influencers (Mariciu, Maria Zvinca, Iulia Boloca and Skivo) generated over 100 social media pieces of content (Facebook/Instagram posts/Instagram Stories) with a reach of over 1 million people and over 10.000 interactions. KFC’s social media content: 11 pieces of content (Facebook & Instagram posts, Instagram Reel, Instagram Stories) generated a reach of over 3 million people and over 30.000 interactions (likes, comments, shares). Compared to the average of all the previous KFC series, AltKFC had +31% average unique viewers, showing the message reached and engaged a larger and a likely more diverse demographic (all data refers to KFC’s YouTube channel – the main broadcast channel for all of the brand’s content series). Furthermore, the campaign raised interest for main publications, podcasts and events in Romania, taking the discussion further as a best practice (Katai’s podcast, Revista Biz). We obtained multiple articles from different media fields: movie reviews, Media & Advertising, retail etc. KFC’s social media content: 11 pieces of content (Facebook & Instagram posts, Instagram Reel, Instagram Stories) generated a reach of over 3 million people and over 30.000 interactions (likes, comments, shares). The press release announcing the results of the study and the launch of the campaign was taken over by 20 important Romanian media outlets. We also had 4 articles in Libertatea & PROTV media outlets for the teasing and reveal stages of the campaign with over 5.000 unique users reading them. Influencers’ PR Blitz containing the launch event invitation generated over 50 social media materials creating an extended buzz around AltKFC.