It was a pretty big brief. Impossible some might say. To launch the new Crispy Chicken Burger in Burger King. A restaurant firstly associated with big, juicy beef burgers, and one that has a terrible poultry reputation. Thousands of people have actively taken to the internet to vent about their terrible BK chicken experiences and now we had to persuade them to come in and try our new chicken offering. Our last chicken burger, the Tendercrisp had sold 6 a week. Yup, 6. We had to sell 25. Tough gig.

Obviously no one was going to undertake such a task, so we took to extreme measures...We employed someone to have the very first bite and giving them 20k for their toil/reward. BK’s CEO announced on his LinkedIn page that he would give 20k to anyone who took the first bite of burger. We promoted this in PR, press & OOH and (very) luckily the public responded with application videos on Twitter & Instagram. BK picked Jim from Wanstead, releasing his first ever bite on FB live. His reaction was the message in our TV and posters. Luckily, he said, "It's alright to be fair". Phew.

"It was clear people hated our chicken. In fact, the previous burger, the Tendercrisp had generated the lowest online sentiment score of any product they’d ever produced. When KFC ran out of chicken, we’d actually managed to make more people more angry. Elsewhere across the UK, a fried chicken craze was raging. A dedicated, obsessed community of connoisseurs was growing fast, taking to social in their thousands to review, meme and rate the UK’s chicken outlets.

Two things became clear. Chicken is a ‘people’s league’, and the success of any chicken product lives or dies on the opinions of the public and that social is the platform that fuels it. It simply wouldn’t fly if we just waded in telling everyone our product was good.

We needed to find our own, of the people, chicken “influencer” who could do it for us and social would be key to finding them.

Obviously no one was going to undertake such a task, so we took to extreme measures...We employed someone to have the very first bite and giving them 20k for their toil/reward. BK’s CEO announced on his LinkedIn page that he would give 20k to anyone who took the first bite of burger. We promoted this in PR, press & OOH and (very) luckily the public responded with application videos on Twitter & Instagram. BK picked Jim from Wanstead, releasing his first ever bite on FB live. His reaction was the message in our TV and posters. Luckily, he said, "It's alright to be fair". Phew.

"Learning the ins and outs of the chicken league in the UK appeared to have paid off. People engaged with the campaign, with 100's of people entering with their take on a truthful review of chicken. In fact, we with a modest media budget, we exceeded our impressions target by 15% - reaching over 2.1 million people. More importantly than that, people LIKED our chicken. Not only did the Crispy Chicken Burger exceed our 25 AUV target, it has been growing at a monthly average of 15 AUVs. And as if all that wasn't enough, after the campaign, joyful conversation around BK’s chicken went from 8% to 25%.