The Campaign

The idea came from two things: The first is the drum beat. In ancient China, drum beats had always been a symbol that motivated the armies. Then the drum beats became a way of cheering in festivals and competitions in Chinese culture. The second is the color red, a symbol of China which happened to be KFC’s brand color. Hence, we came up with the idea of rallying young consumers to use the red KFC buckets as drums to cheer for Team China. We first did an experiment to make sure that the KFC buckets can be used as drums and they worked very well. We then redesigned the bucket with traditional Chinese cultural elements to create KFC Drum Bucket as the center of this campaign. Then we invited a famous musician to create a theme song to demonstrate the qualities of China and inspire consumers to participate.

Creative Execution

We launched an interactive video from the brand’s ambassador Chris Lee on WeChat, the largest social platform, to demonstrate how to use the “KFC Bucket Drum”. The video seemed like her post was interacting with other posts in the feed. Then a young Chinese rock star, Tan Wei-wei performed the song “Red Encouragement”, a rock music reinterpretation of a song from a 300 year old Hua-yin opera. The collision of Western Rock and Chinese Opera made the song truly powerful. The MV, which also served as the TV commercial, was released on the major online music and video platforms, OOH and during an offline concert. Both brand ambassadors released short videos on the largest UGC video platform “Miao-pai” to rally consumers to participate in the relay. We then released an HTML5 game on social media platforms for consumers to hit the drum in time to the music and accumulate beats.

As many celebrities voluntarily joined the relay, KFC “Red Encouragement” created a tremendous social media buzz during the Olympics Games, which led to an excellent sales performance. • 114 million views of Chris Lee’s call-for-action video and 3 million views of her interactive video • 16 million plays of the MV by Tan Wei-wei and 1.55 million views of her call-for-action video in 8 days • 10.4 million participations of HTML 5 game and 55 million drum beats were made in 20 days. • 500 million social media exposure of the social posting # RedEncouragement

The core idea of the “Red Encouragement” campaign was to use KFC buckets as drums to cheer for Team China on social media during the Rio Olympics. An interactive video was launched on WeChat to demonstrate how to use the “KFC Bucket Drum”. The MV of the song, which also served as the TV commercial, was released on the major online music and video platforms, OOH and during an offline concert. KFC’s brand ambassadors released videos on UGC video platform to inspire consumers, and an HTML5 game was released on social media platforms for consumers to participate in the relay.

The key audience of KFC is young adults, aged 16- 35. They grew up when China was rapidly developing economically and gradually playing a more important role on the world stage. They are proud of what the country has accomplished over the past few decades. Especially the wonderful performance in the 2008 Beijing Olympics which made this event one of the proudest national moments in their minds. Our strategy was to make KFC a part of the cheering during the Olympic Games, so the core idea of the “Red Encouragement” campaign was to use the iconic KFC bucket as a drum to cheer for Team China on social media.