Philly AI Kitchen was powered by an all-influencer cast: the host, judges, and chefs were entirely made up of Saudi social media influencers. The influencers were either foodies or chefs, and well-known within the food and beverage community, which increased our content’s relevance and our brand’s credibility. To truly harness the influence and reach of trusted creators within our social content, Philly also put itself within the social channels of the influencers, harnessing their impressive individual digital footprints to generate awareness, and uplift the brand's consideration in a compelling way.

Although this was a KSA-based campaign, the idea was not predicated on any cultural context and is accessible to people from outside the region.

Philadelphia, nicknamed Philly, is a popular cream cheese and well-known in the region. The only problem? It’s not well-consumed.

Philly had been losing share since Q2 2022 with penetration decline. Actually, the whole segment was struggling; even though the cheese category was growing in value by 7% in KSA, tubs hold the lowest share, with only 5% penetration. Philly was dropping due price (28% said cost stopped them from buying), and versatility – it underindexed due to perception that its usage was so limited.

How could we convince them otherwise?

Our goal was to show how Philly’s fresh and creamy taste makes it an ideal ingredient in dozens of dishes by creating influencer recipe content that makes mouths water.

ChatGPT launched in October 2022, and consumers were finding ways to get Artificial Intelligence to help them work smarter, study harder... Who’s to say it couldn’t help them eat better?

Enter Philly AI Kitchen: a webseries showdown where two chefs compete, one with nothing but their own skill, and the other with generative AI on their side.

We needed a cast of creative foodies with the power to change minds and have our consumers looking at Philly in a whole new way. We needed influencers.

In each episode, two influencer chefs open a box of ingredients – including Philly naturally. One relied on their own experience, while the other simply followed instructions to a recipe generated by the ChatGPT. Three judges (also Saudi foodie influencers) then performed a blind taste test and vote on the best dish.

In the Philly AI kitchen, what reigns supreme? Human expertise or artificial intelligence

Looking at our consumers, we found that they’re passionate about food: dining and cooking are top interests among 20- to 44-year-old females in KSA. They also have a huge appetite for social media, with over 40% being ‘heavy users’ of TikTok and Instagram. We decided to run a purely digital activation: the webseries would be developed exclusively for, and live on, social.

We picked Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube as our key platforms: aside from the perfect fit with our target audience’s media habit, it was also a fit with the content: both are highly visual content channels that support co-created content with Influencers.

Using our proprietary platform Fluency, we scouted influencers with high reach in Saudi Arabia with good presence and strong engagement rate. These influencers would hero the content, allowing us to co-create webisodes to live on the brand’s channels and shared on the influencers’ pages for incremental reach.

Putting Philly AI Kitchen required careful planning and organisation: pulling together seven influencers – each with their own calendars and commitment to be together on set meant that all four webisodes had to be filmed within two days. In each episode, they prepared a different meal with Philly - breakfast meal, lunch, dessert, and snack – to showcase how varied its usage is.

Teasers were strategically posted on influencers social platforms to attract followers to the main video on Philadelphia’s. Outtakes and excerpts were edited for Instagram and TikTok to drive interest and viewership. For weeks, the content was promoted with paid media budget, and having familiar faces – like Misho Baeshen (4.8 million followers) and Reem Alahmed (270K followers) - feature in Philly’s content did wonders to boost engagement and capture consumers’ attention.

The results were… mouth-watering. Philly AI Kitchen webisodes circulated on social media channels, garnering a staggering 115 million impressions, over 5.5 million views on the webisodes alone. We earned 421k engagements, largely driven by influencer interaction, and our CPMs dropped by half.

What we had really wanted is to save our cream cheese from languishing on store shelves... and that’s exactly what we did. Looking at Philly’s sales data, we were overjoyed to witness a jump by 0.7% in market share versus the same period last year. Despite the tiny category, Philly had achieved a significant spike in offtake within the tub cheese segment.

Even though the influencer chefs cooked up a storm on set, it was the cool concept of Philly AI Kitchen that was the real chef d’oeuvre.