With a small restaurant footprint in Spain, every restaurant opening is a key business milestone for KFC. And also something important to communicate.

This time, the brief was to communicate the opening of a new restaurant in the island of Tenerife. The problem is that it was the 6th restaurant on the island. Good news for the business. Bad news for the newsworthiness of it.

The objective was to drive transactions to the restaurant, and drive awareness of the new location between the local population, with a very limited budget (under 40.000 euros). We needed to grab both people and media attention to amplify the news.

Normally, you use directional OOH to communicate the location of new restaurants, but that’s not enough. Luckily there was something special about this restaurant: it was located just by the Tenerife North airport. And that unlocked a unique way to promote the restaurant.

We discovered that the restaurant wasn’t just near the airport, but in fact so close that you could see the planes landing from the restaurant surroundings. So instead of the typical directional OOH, roadside signs and billboards, we used something that was already pointing to the restaurant location: the planes landing at the airport.

Yes, we put a vinyl sign on the plane that read KFC por aquí (KFC this way) with an arrow that pointed to the restaurant as they landed in the Tenerife Norte airport. A giant, moving sign that couldn’t be ignored crossing the island sky.

And to make it even more interesting, we invited people to do something for us: if they catched the flight and shared it, they would get to try our fried chicken for free in our new restaurant.

An unconventional use of media that instantly made it to the news.

We needed to get the new location noticed between the local population as the main target to drive sustained traffic to the restaurant.

That’s why we selected Canaryfly, an airline that focuses on interisland flights, mostly used by locals traveling between the different Canary islands, and with a good number of daily flights landing at the Tenerife North airport (a single plane landed 205 times at Tenerife North airport during the active campaign period).

But putting the vinyl into the plane wasn’t enough, so we put a superlocal low budget media plan in place to amplify the opening and the promotion, making use of the opportunities that working with an airline brought, and maximizing the earned media impact to make the low investment work even harder.

We vinyl wrapped an ATR 72-500 aircraft with a giant sign that read “KFC this way”, which was the main execution for the campaign.

Then, we turned it into a promotional mechanic: We challenged people to catch the flight, and get fried chicken. They just needed to take a photo of the plane, and they could redeem 2 fried chicken strips. But if they actually got on the plane and came to the restaurant with their ID and boarding pass, they’ll get a free burger.

We launched the promotion the 24th of July with the first flight of our plane, and we used in-flight radio ads both in the takeoff and landing until August 31st.

We also booked a single back cover of the local newspaper “El día” the day after, and amplified the promotional mechanic with paid posts in Instagram for the rest of the local population.

Our unconventional use of media instantly took the local media by storm, with most local news covering the campaign and talking about the opening. But in fact, it traveled further, reaching national, and even international media. With a low budget local campaign, we got more than 70 million impacts.

The earned media value reached 1 million €. That’s 25x the total investment of the campaign.

But the main result is that the campaign delivered in bringing the local population to the restaurant, driving +26% more transactions than the average opening and making it the most successful restaurant opening in the island.