KFC

KFC's brief was simple to say and very hard to do: become the most iconic UK brand on social, and win Gen Z with an always-on content strategy.

In 2024 we built a team with one job, which was to put KFC in the middle of youth culture. Our weapon of choice was brainrot, the surreal corner of the internet made of hyper-niche references and online celebs your boss has never heard of (shoutout John Pork). No other big brand would touch it. We went all in, opened up a huge lead, and left competitors scrambling to catch up.

Then they caught on. By 2025 brainrot had gone mainstream and brand feeds everywhere were starting to look like ours. Standing still would have meant getting lapped, so from September 2025 we stopped trying to be first and started trying to be boldest. We went bigger, took the risks no one else would, and set out to lead culture rather than chase it. We ran an 80:20 split: 80% fed the brainrot world our audience already loved, and 20% pushed it so far it surprised even our diehards. We brought big campaign moments into the brainrot universe instead of letting them sit outside it, and we followed our audience onto the platforms they actually live on.

The results speak for themselves. Shares rose 73,900% in year one. Since then we've driven more than 1 billion organic views and 106M+ engagements across 700+ unique assets, which adds up to 183 years of watch time. All of it came from our active reach approach: content people choose to watch, not content they scroll past.

The work has picked up silverware along the way. We've won Greatest Creative at the TikTok Ad Awards 2024, our organic social strategy took Bronze at The Drum Marketing Awards EMEA 2026, and KFC x Stranger Things partnership was shortlisted at the UK Social Media Awards 2026.

The lesson from the whole era is that in the attention economy, the best way to sell is to stop acting like you're selling.