Getting people interested in your original recipe is no easy task. In Spain nobody knows that KFC has an original secret recipe, least of all care about it.

Luckily for us there’s a place where our original recipe was actually famous: Youtube.There are more than 500000 videos from creators and cooks trying to replicate KFC’s original recipe.

We hijacked their videos turning each of their unique URLs into digital currency people could exchange for the real thing: original recipe chicken strips. Imitators got more views, we got people to try our chicken with an engaging social scavenger hunt.

KFC is still a small brand in Spain compared to the other QSR competitors such as McDonald's or Burger King. For scale purposes, we have 200 restaurants compared to Burger King's more than 1000. But we have an advantage: we have the most engaged social community of any brand in Spain.

The main challenge of this brief was to raise awareness of KFC's original recipe through social media. The problem is that the only one who knew about the recipe was the brand, not consumers.

So how could we get people interested in our recipe?

The objective apart of raising awareness was to reach new consumers, driving new user visits to our website and in the end to our restaurants to try the original recipe.

We found out that despite most consumers don't know about KFC's original recipe, there are hundreds of thousands of Youtube videos explaining how to copy it from all over the world. In fact it's one of the most copied recipes in Youtube.

So we decided to use the huge number of people who have attempted to replicate the Colonel’s recipe at home to provide a degree of social proof that positively influences consumers’ perceptions of the brand and recipe to make it more desirable.

The idea: make people look for KFC copycat recipe videos on Youtube in order to try the Original recipe. How? By turning each video url into a free original recipe chicken tenders coupon.

To gather the data, we used an automated neuronal network connected to Youtube's API to track all the videos containing KFC copycat recipes, and turned each video's unique URL into an individual promotional code to try our original recipe chicken strips.

Then we created our own video, made from parts of existing Youtube videos from creators replicating the recipe. And we targeted 18-35 Youtube users explaining the mechanic: they just had to search for the copycat videos, copy the video URL and paste it in a microsite to claim their free chicken coupon.

Without them even knowing, the Youtube recipe imitators became our ambassadors and influencers, got more views and comments on their videos, and in exchange, we got attention, relevance for our recipe, and started a scavenger hunt for Youtube URLs to turn into free chicken.

First we developed the microsite that connected to Youtube's API, where people could turn the video URLs into original recipe strips coupons.

Then, we created a video targeting youtube users, made from parts of the copycat videos to explain the process they needed to follow, got them searching for unclaimed URLs and redirected them to the microsite.

And we also created several social media pieces both in Youtube and Twitter amplifying the promo, the mechanic, and building hype.

YouTube searches for KFC chicken cooking tutorials increased by 1,100% and the campaign video had over 1.2 million views. In the weeks following the launch of the campaign, different media and programs in Spain included KFC-style recipes in their cooking sections. Even Carlos Arguiñano, one of the most famous Spanish chefs in the country, created his own version on TV organically.

Meanwhile, the KFC Spain website had a 40% increase in traffic, of which 62% were new user visits.

The campaign also converted into sales, with KFC in Spain seeing a 227% surge in new user transactions and a 19,97% increase in restaurant visits during the campaign period.

46% conversion rate (vs 4% average).

+14K videos claimed in the first 24 hours.

+28k pieces of chicken redeemed.

+13 MM impressions.

+800K interactions