Colonel Sanders, the founder of KFC, was the world’s greatest chicken salesman. To him, any occasion was a fried chicken occasion, and in his time, he would go to great lengths to promote KFC, sponsoring mandolin bands, appearing on game shows, and recording Christmas albums. So it only made sense that if he were still around today and needed to sell more buckets of chicken, he would tap into one of the biggest group-dining occasions in America: football.

Our creative idea was to introduce people to America’s newest professional American football team: the Kentucky Buckets, with Colonel Sanders as owner, head coach, and marketing director. And in the spirit of the Colonel’s showmanship, we treated the Kentucky Buckets like they were a real, bona fide professional American football team.

First, we introduced our audience to the Kentucky Buckets on TV, with comedian Rob Riggle portraying Colonel Sanders in a series of spots. To extend our TV presence beyond just game time, we partnered with Fox Sports to have Coach Colonel appear on The Manning Hour with Cooper Manning.

Online, we gave the Buckets their own social presence on Tumblr, featuring the team’s long and storied history. Between the end of regular season and playoffs, a period in which there are no games, we launched a fully playable football game on Instagram to give fans fresh football content to engage with.

Rounding out the campaign, the Buckets showed up in two other components of football fandom: fantasy football and the athletes. With ESPN, we surrounded their fantasy football content, and with Fox Sports, we sponsored NFL PROCast, where fans tune in to hear from their favorite professional football players.

With the help of the Kentucky Buckets, we drove Kentucky Fried Chicken to a winning season. Same-store sales for the promotional window overall were +5% vs. the year prior, and sales of KFC’s high end (i.e., buckets of chicken) were up 5% as well. Best of all, this sales growth for both the brand and buckets of chicken comes at a time when the rest of the category was facing declining sales growth, down an average of 0.1% during the same period.