Digital campaign for Greenpeace to expose KFC’s links to illegal rainforest destruction — and force a change in supplier policy.
When Greenpeace uncovered that KFC’s packaging was made from illegally pulped Indonesian rainforest, they needed to break that story at scale across Asia. The campaign generated over 100,000 emails to KFC’s parent company Yum!, pushing 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
Environmental campaigns built on images of devastation — dead tigers, burned forest — had created a kind of audience numbness. The brief was to break that pattern: to design something energetic and participatory that made people want to get involved, rather than look away.
Turning KFC’s brand against itself
The creative strategy was a brand hijack. Rather than Greenpeace campaigning against KFC, the campaign made KFC’s own packaging do the talking — animating the cups, buckets and boxes into a disgruntled band of activists who had discovered the truth about what they were made from. The packaging characters were designed to feel like something KFC might have made themselves, which was precisely what gave the campaign its reach: it was indistinguishable from authentic KFC marketing until the moment it wasn’t.
The fake microsite
The campaign launched with a fake KFC microsite — visually identical to KFC’s own marketing until the moment it sprang to life. What appeared to be a standard promotional page was actually a full-screen animated video in which the packaging characters hijacked the site to reveal the environmental cost of their own manufacture. The reveal was designed to feel like exactly the kind of surprise the campaign was built around: you thought you knew what this was. You didn’t.
The activist dashboard
After the video, visitors landed on a campaign dashboard designed to convert awareness into action. They could email Yum!’s CEO directly, or — playing on the double meaning of the word — create their own revolting packaging: customising one of the characters and sharing it across social channels to recruit others into the revolt. A live leaderboard tracked the top revolters globally, raising the stakes of participation and turning the campaign into a competition.
Fake pre-roll ads
To seed the campaign across Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, a series of fake KFC pre-roll ads were placed alongside real KFC content. Each followed the same pattern as the microsite: a few seconds of convincing KFC branding before the packaging characters broke through to deliver the campaign message. Running as paid media against KFC’s own audience meant the campaign reached exactly the people it needed to.
