KFC’s ‘Bribe Buckets’ campaign allows Call of Duty gamers in the UAE and Saudi Arabia to bribe their opponents with fried chicken vouchers when their virtual lives are in danger.
The campaign, created by TBWA\RAAD and launched on 14 January, was not developed in partnership with Call of Duty’s publisher, Activision, but leverages the game’s proximity chat feature, which — as its name suggests — enables players to speak to one another when they’re in close proximity.
‘Usually, if you get close to your enemy you’re going to try and kill them. So you have to bribe your way out of the situation with the proximity chat feature. We basically hacked that moment of the game to say, “Don’t kill me, I have a voucher for you!”’ Frederico Roberto, executive creative director at TBWA\RAAD, explained.
Gaming is a ‘big vertical pillar of business’
Roberto said the agency has worked on multiple gaming projects for KFC over the last 18 months. Gaming is a ‘big vertical pillar of business’ for KFC, he added, because its target audience spends a lot of time and money on it.
‘Gaming creates a little bit more engagement and brand love than traditional advertising because there’s just that direct engagement with the target audience, which you cannot have from a radio ad or a press ad or a billboard,’ Roberto said.
The campaign kicked off with a TikTok video from KFC’s @kfcgamingme account (a profile dedicated to gaming content). Fans who reposted the video then received KFC voucher codes in their DMs. Roberto explained why they chose TikTok over Instagram for the campaign: ‘We felt that the conversations on TikTok are much more fluid and transactional in the sense that TikTok has that sort of two-way street tone to it.’
When asked about the brief for the ‘Bribe Buckets’ campaign, Roberto said, ‘I always tell our creatives that when you work with any client, not just KFC, you should consider yourself forever briefed on everything because you should know the business problems, challenges, and opportunities. So the team came up with this idea very proactively.’
Leveraging influencers
TBWA\RAAD and KFC also tapped content creators for this campaign, sending them briefcases with Bribe Bucket coupons.
‘Influencers play a big role nowadays in any full-fledged media plan,’ Roberto said. ‘Content creators and influencers have that added benefit of being real people talking to you, not the brand talking to you. And yes, they might be getting paid for that, but it still comes with that level of authenticity.’
Roberto noted that collaborating with influencers allowed KFC to reach more eyeballs and drive engagement, adding that such collaborations should never be one-sided.
‘Influencers love being part of these initiatives and being selected because it allows them to also create more content for their pages. In any campaign, it’s always important to not just use influencers and content creators and ask them to push a message that they don’t like. They like to be part of it and they like that we can give them something that will populate their pages,’ he said.
Results and ‘soft benefits’
The campaign is still underway but it is already proving to be a success, according to Roberto, with fans requesting over 400 vouchers on the first day and the TikTok film garnering 5 million impressions at launch.
But it’s not just about the buckets.
‘Obviously, people redeeming vouchers and getting into stores or getting into the app is the goal. That being said, there are soft benefits,’ Roberto said, and this campaign shows customers that the brand is ‘willing to put their money where their mouth is’ and do something for the gaming community it’s targeting.
‘So even if there were zero vouchers redeemed, moving the needle on brand love would already be a great win,’ he said.
According to the agency, it typically costs between $500,000 and $1 million to feature a branded in-game item on COD whereas they ‘did it for the price of a few KFC buckets and spent zero budget in-game’.
Featured image: KFC Bribe Buckets campaign
