It’s common knowledge that 87% of TV viewers browse their mobile during TV ads while subliminally continuing to observe the bigger screen. What if we used technology to bridge mobile and TV to create a simultaneous experience? What if we could use on-the-fly creativity to deliver on mobile a brand message whose story connected to what’s playing on TV at-precisely-the-same-time?

So we decided to use the second screen synch technology to hijack ads of all brands that advertise heavily on TV during CNY period.

We identified 20 TV commercials that were predicted to both garner social currency and have big media investments. For each one of these ads, we singled-out its most memorable part and used that as inspiration to create a snappy KFC parody. We now had twenty KFC videos mimicking the 20 popular ads during CNY.

Seconds after a commercial for another brand appears on a TV channel, KFC spots mimicking that commercial reached out to people who are looking at their mobile or tablet devices while watching TV.

Key implementation benchmarks

1. Custom algorithm curates TV commercials for shortlisting.

2. Custom visual recognition API to deploy the mobile ad.

3. Real time syncing to social feed of target audience

4. Daily reports pushed to war room so we turn around new content in 3 days

Data sources/tools

1. Nielsen for TV data.

2. Netbase for social listening feeds.

3. Custom in-house API for visual recognition.

4. 4C Insights to deploy TV sync capability to Facebook, Google and Instagram.

The TV-synch campaign kicked-off a week before the start of the festival and ended 7 days later. So this was a sharp 14 day burst to garner maximum attention and sales.

1. The product sold off within 6 weeks. Two weeks faster than targeted date.

2. KFC’s sales were 60% higher as compared to the same CNY period last year

3. For the first time in decades the ad recall and TOM scores for a KFC CNY product was higher than the McD prosperity burger.

4. 45% of all video views crossed the 10 second mark and the VTR beat industry average by 50%.