Getting people interested in something like an original recipe is usually a boring and hard brief. Specially when you want to turn that interest into action: trial.

But we managed to turn the fact that it was one of the most imitated on Youtube into a call to action to try it. How? By hijacking the videos that try to copy it and turning them into an invitation to try the original.

Using data and technology as enablers, we made people search for the recipe, know more about it, come to our website and finally try KFC's original recipe.

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.

The main challenge of this brief was to raise awareness of KFC's original recipe. The problem is that the only one who cared about the recipe was the brand, not consumers. Specially in a country where kfc is not as iconic as everywhere else in the world.

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 ecommerce 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 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 all of those videos 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, to try the Original recipe, by turning each of their urls into a free original 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 a video targeting 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.

The call to action was "look for the copies, taste the original". We redirected people to a microsite in which the could turn the video url's into coupons.

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 and redirected them to the microsite.

And then we also created several social media pieces 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. There was also a surge of organic news in media talking about KFC's original recipe

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