Digital campaign for Greenpeace to reveal KFC’s links to rainforest destruction.
When Greenpeace discovered KFC’s packaging was made from illegally pulped rainforest, my studio was hired to break the news across Asia.
Our campaign generated over 100,000 emails to KFC’s parent company Yum! encouraging them to commit to a sustainable sourcing policy. KFC’s packaging supplier Asia Pulp & Paper also pledged to remove rainforest timber from their entire supply chain.
The challenge
In the wake of previous rainforest campaigns featuring sadly now familiar images of dead tigers and deforestation, our challenge was to deliver an uplifting and empowering campaign.
Avoiding charity fatigue
We targeted a young audience with a campaign that turned familiar KFC packaging into a upbeat band of activists. Our heroes were on a mission to reveal how they came to be manufactured from illegal rainforest pulp.
Viral microsite
To introduce our activist heroes we launched a fake KFC microsite — what first appeared to be a normal KFC marketing was actually a full screen video. To each visitor’s surprise the packaging featured on the microsite sprang into life, hijacking the page to reveal KFC’s links to illegal rainforest logging.
Campaign microsite
On watching the viral video visitors were taken to the campaign’s activist dashboard. Here they could get directly involved with the campaign, emailing Yum!’s CEO, or creating their own revolting packaging to encourage friends to join the revolt against KFC.
Viral advertising
To provide social media links back to our fake microsite we seeded a number of fake KFC commercials across Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Just like our microsite, each commercial was hijacked by our cardboard activists to reveal the environmental cost of their production.
