KFC Golden Egg Crunch TV Hijack is a first of its kind cross-screen hijack at scale.

To hijack the most popular TV commercials, we couldn’t rely on Media Banks as they were only updated monthly.

Instead, we developed our own in-house API to intensive econometric model exercise to identify the right commercials to sync up with our target audience at the right time.

We also applied visual recognition supervised algorithms to make sure that the scenes with the highest attention span were singled out to be made into a KFC commercial.

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 identify the moment when 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

We used five different data sources/tools

1. Nielsen for TV data.

2. Netbase for social listening feeds.

3. Google Analytics for search behaviours.

4. Custom in-house API for visual recognition.

5. 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.

The chicken crossed devices with a huge ROI as:

1. KFC’s sales grew 60% higher compared to first product launches in the previous year.

2. Media spend used only 70% of the allocated budget, with earned PR value of 270%!

3. Over 8.24 million impressions generated across organic and paid efforts.

4. Campaign achieved 4,203,324 unique reach within just 17 days of the campaign period (30 days).

5. The 20 videos garnered 1,234,369 total video views with 529,550 10-sec views.

6. Our view-through-rate (VTR) is 6% which is higher than the industry performance benchmark of 4%-5%.

7. To top it all off, the chickens ran out weeks before the promo period ended, making us achieved our KPI with lesser amount of time and money!

Data gathering

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 to create a snappy KFC parody.

Target Audience

Given the mass nature of our product our TG covered all families.

We created an API connected directly to the TV log data and econometrically modelled 10 years of CNY commercials to understand patterns on budgeting, media scheduling, reach build-up as well as social success and search behaviours triggered. Using these learnings we identified 20 TV commercials that we predicted would become popular and also be heavily advertised.

Media planning

Combining data from social media, viewership and ad program, the TV Sync technology we used deployed the 20 parodies on Facebook, Instagram and Google platforms within seconds of the live commercial trigger on TV during prime time (11am-2pm & 7pm-11pm).

Situation

This Chinese New Year (CNY), KFC launched its Golden Egg Crunch to compete against the long standing, much-loved, festive hero; McDonalds Prosperity Burger.

The brief

In Malaysia, if a brand needs huge reach, TV is the only medium. Plus during festive periods all other ‘mass’ brands also spend heavily on TV. KFC didn’t have the money to dominate the medium, yet we needed to stand out.

In terms of time frame, how we performed in a 14 day period (7 days before and 7 days after the D day) would define how the product would perform.

Objective

In the QSR category, awareness is the key driver to sales. So, we had two objectives.

1. Capture attention and win on top-of-mind against McDonald’s Prosperity Burger during CNY.

2. Sell out within 8 weeks; this was a limited time offer and any left-over stock is a straight loss.