In 2020, KFC were faced with the difficult fact that their 70 year-old slogan had become inappropriate. Finger Lickin’ topped the list when it came to Covid safety violations. We decided to meet that challenge with a tongue-in-cheek (but not on-fingers) campaign where we pixelated, removed and advised against our own slogan. We all assumed that by 2021, we’d be able to use it again. Unfortunately not, and so another burst of activity was necessary - to keep the brand (and its challenges) front-of-mind.

The new brief was to come up with a campaign that built on our 2020 activity - a pandemic response all about the fact that It’s Finger Lickin’ Good had gone overnight from being one of the world’s most famous slogans, to the world’s least appropriate. It needed to have a similar sense of fun and, while the slogan remained inappropriate, building on the previous work.

Our old slogan was on hiatus. We didn’t really want to create a brand new one. All we needed was a stop-gap solution. We looked around and saw plenty of other brands had perfectly good slogans that would make sense underneath a bucket of chicken. And very simply, we decided to ‘borrow’ them. And just hope those other brands didn’t sue us.

To help us work out which endlines we’d ask to borrow, we defined three principles to help us choose the perfect alternate slogans.

1. IS IT FUNNY?

Would it make someone laugh if our borrowed slogan actually was KFC’s slogan.

2. KEEP IT RECOGNISABLE

Try to pick slogans that people recognise as slogans - even if they don’t necessarily recognise the original brands

3. USE LOCALLY RELEVANT SLOGANS

Make sure you use it exactly as the original brand does. If you need to alter it, it doesn’t work!

We wanted to tap into our audience’s native behaviours, tagging our brand targets and encouraging audience input on picking slogans to try on. We also bolstered reach with an in-feed presence on Facebook and Instagram.

Our goal across markets was to create a single global moment – galvanising around the same launch day and hashtag globally and rolling out over 4 days across KFC’s global accounts.

Whilst some markets did boost content with a small paid spend, the success of the campaign depended on earned engagement from brands and fans alike. Something that can’t be bought.

Whilst each market was provided with a social media playbook and template assets – creating a consistent campaign red thread around the world – we also encouraged local community managers to put their own tonal spin on content so all activity felt native to their audience and social tone of voice.

We executed the campaign across a wide range of digital and real world formats. Digitally, we focused on paid content, organic content, interaction with other brands and interaction with fans. The alternate end lines also made their way onto digital billboards, digital vans and even menu boards.

We borrowed an impressive 36 end lines in total, resulting in a huge number of earned impressions, over 190m in total.

The campaign also earned 51 pieces of media coverage. With 86% covering the campaign positively, and 95% including the key messages of the campaign in the coverage.