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.

We invited Ms. 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 music video, which also served as the TV commercial, was released on all the major online music and video platforms as well as during an offline concert.

In addition to the MV, Ms. Tan released a short video on the most popular UGC video platform “Miao-pai” to rally consumers to participate in the “Red Encouragement Drum Beat Relay”. We then released a 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.

• 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