Grow brand love and engagement amongst Gen Z on social, by tapping into relevant culture and conversation within this diverse audience.
We spotted that a small, but vocal part of our audience were asking us to ‘Oil Up’
‘Oil Up’ is an emerging slang term, used by Gen Z & Gen Alpha; a little bit of nonsense that was taking TikTok by storm with a handful of brands (such as Duolingo) jumping into the conversation. We listened to our audience and decided it was time to oil up ‘Admin’ … with our own distinct KFC twist!
All we needed was an SE London warehouse, a paddling pool, two giant bottles of cooking oil, and some key ingredients that make KFC so delicious … their herbs and spices mix of course!! Our admins were fitted out in head to toe KFC merch and oil chaos ensued.
With our hero creative ready, we built hype by dropping two organic teasers and using a reply to comment format to hint at a big "oil up" release. The audience reaction showed the campaign's potential, and we used that momentum with Spark ads to launch our hero creative.
*disclaimer - no admins were harmed in the making of this ad
We root all KFC content on platform trends and insights, and this campaign was no exception. Our TikTok-first strategy used Brand Watch for social listening, TikTok Creative Centre for platform insights and manual deep dives on the platform to identify trends and sentiment, all to give us a comprehensive view of what our audience are talking about and reacting to. The “Oil Up” trend, built upon Gen Z slang, was the perfect vehicle to entertain and engage our target audience.
Using the ‘Oil Up’ trending sound, split-screen edit format and filming entirely on iPhone we were able to create truly native, platform first creative.
Using a cavernous and oversized warehouse for our setting helped create an ‘epic’ look and feel, that contrasted with the ridiculous content. This coupled with candid talent reactions added humour, authenticity and drove an incredible amount of conversation and connection in the comments; we saw over 6K comments within the first 24 hours.
The effectiveness of this trend-led, platform-first content is shown by some industry beating numbers:
Reach: our creative was promoted by the algorithm and flew within minutes of posting, reaching over 2.3M unique users organically, while additional paid budget from both spark and in feed ads drove incredibly efficient distribution with a CPM of £1.25, allowing us to drive our reach up by a further 21%.
Views: content drove 2.7M views organically, while our ad solutions drove an additional 2.6M views amongst our target audience.
Engagement: the content had an organic engagement rate of 17.54%, which is a 250% increase on the brand average, while our paid activity drove performance even higher, with an ER of 35%. This meant over 560K unique people were liking, sharing, saving and, most importantly, commenting on our hero content. And the sentiment was overwhelmingly positive. See here for example comments.
The winning combination: organic beats that tap into our audience’s conversation in an authentic way and can be amplified through paid to reach a broad, relevant and engaged audience at scale. Good content is the greatest driver of efficiency, and this creative proves just that.
TikTok Ad Awards Winner - This project also won Greatest Creative in TikTok Ad Awards 2024 - LINK HERE
"As soon as Uncovered brought this campaign idea to the table we knew we had to make it work. The insights they brought, proved that our audience were desperate for us to jump on this trend, and the excitement within the business, all the way up to senior management, was palpable. And the creative did not disappoint. Oil Up was our highest ever performing piece of content on social (at the time) and it showed the power of listening to our audience to inspire something truly iconic. Uncovered’s understanding of social and platform-first trends shines through in everything they do, and their ability to translate Gen Z insights and drivers into genuinely watchable content has been a winning combination for KFC’s social, which has been transformed with this partnership."
Danielle Ruggles, Marketing Manager KFC
