Social media is a real-time reflection of everything that happens outside of it. So when a sand storm from the Sahara desert hit Spain, social media was filled with images of streets and cars covered with sand.

But for us, as KFC, all we could see were breaded cars.

So, we responded quickly and took the conversation into our own territory, by getting people on social media to draw our logo on their "breaded cars" and bring them to our drive-thrus, generating lots of user generated content and achieving a reach of 302 million with a media budget of 0€.

QSR restaurants are always affected by climate. Whenever it rains, or the weather is not good, people stop coming to the restaurant, so it's not good for business.

Imagine when instead of rain, Spain woke up in the morning with orange dust from the Sahara desert falling from the sky, covering everything in the streets. Restaurant owners started to panic because people were advised not to go out.

But KFC identified a blessing in disguise, an opportunity to react to the context and turn it into a conversation about our brand.

So we decided to create a promotion to drive buzz, and even traffic to our drive thru's. Because where everybody else saw dirty cars, we saw breaded cars.

The first moment we put a foot on the street, we couldn't help but see breaded cars. Yes, we might be a little biased. And we all know that whenever you see dirty cars, we also can't help but draw with our finger on the dust.

So we decided to turn every car covered in dust, into a potential KFC ad.

How? By telling people that if they draw our logo in their "breaded" cars and came to a KFC Auto drive thru during the sandstorm, we will give them 2 chicken strips with our original recipe breading for free.

A simple, fun and cheeky social activation to drive attention to our drive thrus, and own the conversation.

Our potential audience was anyone that had a car and had been impacted by the sandstorm. As we had no media budget and we had to react almost in real time, we focused on our own social media followers base.

And our secondary target was media, knowing that the sandstorm was going to make the headlines that day.

So we had to react in record time, launching the promotion early in the morning in order to catch both people's and media attention.

We had to react very quickly. So we simply wrote our promotion on a few cars as an example, took a picture and posted it on our Twitter account with a clear CTA: "If you come to any KFC Auto with a "breaded" car and the letters "K" "F" "C" finger-painted on it, we'll give you two free chicken strips with the original breading.

By mid morning, it was out, and the restaurants notified. It was as simple as that. We waited, and the social storm began.

In less than 24 hours, we got over 1000 people to draw our logo in their cars and, despite being in the middle of the sand storm, came to our drive thrus.

In fact, google searches for "KFC Auto" increased by +588%.

After three days, even with the recommendation to not go out, drive thru transactions had increased by 10,8%. And even with the losses the sandstorm generated in normal restaurant traffic, this idea helped us increase it by 5,2%.

We got a lot of people moving and drawing our logo, but we got even more people talking about it. We instantly made the headlines in local media, and it spread all over the world.

The impact of the action was huge, with more than 302M combined media reach, and our own social media channels generated 9.582.796 organic impressions.

Earned media value went over 4,3M€. All with 0€ media budget.