2020/2021 Winners & Shortlists

Why is this work relevant for PR?

This work is relevant for the PR category because it relied entirely on single people spreading the news about our promotion. We had a really small budget to get things started but everything after that hinged on people’s PR - word of mouth. We reached 2.6 million people because everyone who was lonely on valentine’s day told other lonely people they knew about KFC’s Lonely Valentine Specials by tagging or sharing with them.

Background

Our brief was to promote a limited-time promo that ran for Valentine’s Day. With Valentine’s becoming increasingly a cultural moment in the region that audiences connect with, especially our youth target audience, KFC wanted to reach out to them. But not the typical audience brands speak to on this occasion, but instead we realized there was a whole demographic of single people that brands tend to ignore as they were deemed irrelevant. Those were the people we wanted to speak to as they were being left out. Our objective was to stay true to our audience in our communication and speak to them in a voice they would relate to. Our goal was to drive brand awareness and brand love effortlessly using the casual tonality of the messaging.

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

For a lot of people, love might be the best feeling anyone can experience, but at the end of the day, love is just a chemical reaction, chemical component C8H11NO2 to be exact also known as dopamine. You engage in acts of love, your brain releases dopamine, you feel happy, but dopamine isn’t exclusively connected to love, other activities can release dopamine as well such as eating a great tasting piece of KFC chicken. With this in mind, we created different KFC meals that would release varying degrees of dopamine to substitute the missing dopamine obtained from various acts of love. For example: Have no one to hug? Get the meal equivalent to the hug.

Describe the PR strategy (30% of vote)

Our strategy was to speak to the youth; those who were single on Valentine’s Day. We targeted them based on their facebook relationship status and by using social listening. We responded to people who posted anti-valentine tweets and posted anything using #lonely. Our campaign hinged on one key social behaviour: Only single people understand what other single people go through on Valentine’s Day. And it worked. Because single people tagged more single people who tagged other single people on our posts. Eventually reaching 2.6 million people.

Describe the PR execution (20% of vote)

Owing to a minimal budget, we executed the entire campaign in-house. Our campaign launched 4 days before Valentine’s Day and ran only on Social media. We targeted people on Facebook & Instagram with 4 unique assets with each asset communicating a different scenario that single people miss out on during Valentine’s Day (Holding hands, Cuddling, Peck on the Cheek & A kiss). To extend the experience beyond the social platforms, we transformed the KFC website to include the meal’s and rebranded it to show that there is a place for singles on Valentine’s Day.

List the results (30% of vote)

KFC reached 2.6 million people for Valentine’s day across UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and Lebanon, in just 4 days. More than visibility, social content generated more than 20,000 qualified clicks to website, increasing the conversion rate by 15% which proved that people were definitely feeling the love for KFC this Valentines. Generating footfall as well, more than 30,000 people who've seen the content walked into a KFC restaurant. The Cost per store visit was 42% lesser than usual.