The Campaign

Our Idea was to create The KFC Buckethead Fan Movement This was inspired by the connection fans have with their teams. Supporting a team unites us by creating a true occasion with mates. KFC needed to become central to that occasion. Therefore we wanted to create a unique and ownable, iconic device for fans to demonstrate support for their team. After an exhaustive review of merchandise options we choose something that KFC was already using in retail to sell chicken to large groups. The KFC bucket become our tribal device and what better place for them to be worn than on the heads of our fans in stadiums to demonstrate their team support, receive global television coverage and also to sell chicken. We combined 5 franchise colours and the iconic Colonel image on one bucket. Essentially fans had their own KFC bucket for their team.

Creative Execution

Our activity ran across the 4 month Rugby season, 15 games, 1500 minutes of match time and included: 1. Promotion: Buy to win tickets to game • Player, Fan and Meal Offer TVC’s in and out of game to drive reach and store traffic. • Radio: KFC For the Fans content pieces on air, on street and at game-hosted fanzone events. Including Pandora playlists created by the players themselves for their fans. • Adshels near stadiums, stadium signage • Special build Super Rugby Selfie Stations in high dwell zones. 2. 15 In game activations via Fanzones and Buckethats. • Player meet and greet • BucketHat merchandise • KFC seat and eat • Social media ambassadors capturing and sharing content back out to our hub. • We also negotiated crowd-panning Buckethead shots at every game. 3. Forthefans.co.nz hub A content and promotion hub sharing buckethead moments and memories driven by 3 posts a week on facebook and BucketHead fan UGC

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

Consumer awareness: Awareness of KFC as a sponsor of Super Rugby went from 21% in the previous season to 40% after the first 6 weeks of buckethead activity. Business: We achieved an incremental 1 million in chicken sales yoy increasing upon the previously years record sales. Response Rate: We received over 37,000 promotional entries, +300% on target. Impressions: • Social Media at the game accumulated 1.02million impressions, from 408,000 newsfeeds • BucketHat acceptance was phenomenal generating an estimated 92 seconds airtime from live game coverage or $120,000 in additional rate card value. • Forthefans content has generated 1,909,039 views of buckethead content • At the centre of the campaign the Buckethead movement was at 15 games- visible to more than 300,000 fans at the game and 3.542 million fans watching at home ROI: For every dollar we invested, we achieved 20 times the value in media coverage across television, social and in stadium.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

KFC is a challenger fast food brand which requires promotional activity to drive much needed retail footfall every minute of every day in the battle for share of mouth. Consumer trends of health and wellbeing were not in our favour and in fact impacting upon our ability to leverage sponsorship investment in Super Rugby. We needed to find a new negotiation angle and positioning for our chicken that would deliver much needed sales. Our BucketHead Fan Movement did just that –delivering +1M in sales.

Our strategy needed to: 1. Establish our right to play Super Rugby had always expressed a concern about increasing the role of our product as they needed to manage player endorsement of fastfood. We needed to find a new negotiation angle. Research told us that Millennials had become disengaged with Super Rugby and less likely to go to a game. With a Facebook community of 360,000 Millennials, KFC gave Rugby franchises credibility amongst this audience. This opened the door to be able to: 2. Engage the fans to sell more chicken. We tapped into the consumer insight that fan behavior is largely tribal, seeking symbols to show their collective passion behind their team. If we could create a promotional experience for our fans using our Bucket then we knew we could create a game day ritual for KFC and if the bucket was being emptied, sell more chicken.