With more than 40,000 restaurants in over 100 countries, McDonald’s is the world’s largest fast food chain by a pretty wide margin. But while McDonald’s is inarguably the leader in fast food, they aren’t the leader when it comes to fried chicken - that’s KFC’s territory. So when the big, bad burger chain decided to steer into KFC’s lane with the launch of the Chicken Big Mac, a new twist on their signature sandwich, KFC wasn’t just going to watch it happen without doing anything.

Our brief was to rain on McDonald’s launch day parade and reinforce our status as the undisputed champs when it comes to chicken.

We wanted to take the wind out of McDonald’s sails by hijacking the conversation on the Chicken Big Mac launch day. Our idea was to show Canadians how much better the sandwich would have been if they’d used KFC fried chicken. We did this by creating visuals of the iconic Big Mac sandwich except instead of replacing the beef patties with the sad looking McDonald’s chicken strips, we replaced them with the generous, mouth watering KFC chicken and then paired the visual with a tagline that simply read ‘Fixed It’ and the hashtag #betterwithKFC.

Our objective was to reinforce our status as the undisputed leader when it comes to fried chicken, so that needed to be our central focus when it came to the strategy. Working in our favor were a handful of early reviews of the Chicken Big Mac which called out the sandwich for having small, underwhelming chicken patties. Research showed that KFC chicken not only looked better, but tasted better as well. It was these data points that made us feel confident going head to head with the biggest fast food chain in the world.

From a channel perspective, we wanted to be in places that not only allowed us to respond immediately, but also places where we could spark a conversation amongst the younger demographic of Gen Z and Millennials we were looking to attract. These criteria made social channels like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok ideal platforms for our message.

Within minutes of McDonald’s Canada announcing the launch on Twitter, we responded with a simple Tweet: “There, we fixed it” along with an image of our upgraded Chicken Big Mac. The internet ate it up, with millions of Canadians tuning into our real-time chicken war.

But we didn’t stop there, we took it to actual McDonald's locations with truck-sized billboards in front of their golden arches. Canadians and the media took notice, and our response-driven campaign made national and international news.

Then we made it real by adding “The Big Fix '' to KFC’s secret menu – driving customers in-store to try our version of the Chicken Big Mac made entirely with KFC ingredients. We then partnered with prominent food influencers like @mukbangmaxwell, who helped spread the word on social media, prompting Canadians to buy it and film their reviews on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

Despite McDonald's having more marketing dollars, locations, and social media followers, KFC successfully threw a wet blanket on their much anticipated launch of the Chicken Big Mac. We hijacked the conversation and in doing so, reminded Canadians that when it comes to chicken, everything's better with KFC.

Our campaign was an overnight success quickly attracting 100k in free national news coverage. Within days it amassed over 10 million impressions—equivalent to over a quarter of Canada's population.

Our ambitious goal to hijack the conversation was met with an impressive 18x increase in earned media compared to paid. The debate not only fueled a 72% increase in social engagement, it generated an 86% rise in positive brand perception for KFC.

KFC's $30k campaign investment had a remarkable impact on their business as well, boosting store sales by 5.1% and generating an impressive 2859% in return on spend.