As the Super Rugby season returns, so have KFC’s rugby-themed campaigns to celebrate the love of the game by rewarding fans for their support – this time by letting them spend time with the players.
In part one of the campaign, by Ogilvy & Mather, Hurricane player Jeff To’omanga-Allen gives a young man a haircut who deems his effort “pretty good”, Akira Ioane from the Blues makes tea and does the scanning for an office worker, and Highlanders player Waisake Naholo plays netball (with an unfair height advantage) against a young school team.
Gaelyn Churchill, creative director, says Ogilvy has had thousands of entries for ‘For the fans’ campaign including grooming miniature horses, ballet lessons and needing help to re-sleeper a stretch of vintage train tracks.
The ‘For the Fans’ campaign was launched in 2016 to celebrate the camaraderie fans experience when heading to the game, which last year made the at-home watching experience just as exciting as at the game by creating The KFC Epic Fan Box for a lucky winner. Ogilvy has had the KFC restaurant brands account for seven years.
Churchill says as a sponsor of the Super Rugby competition, KFC is in a privileged position to facilitate a stronger connection between fans and the game.
“The ‘For the Fans’ platform was developed to bring Kiwi rugby fans closer to their favourite game and players by creating unique money-can’t-buy experiences.”
Fellow creative director Peter Wujkowski says each year KFC gets a certain amount of time with Super Rugby players to create the campaigns and this year, it decided to give that time away to real fans for a KFC one-on-one experience.
He says the campaign launched with an ad showing what fans could do with their player, without actually using any players, to maximise the amount of player time KFC could give away, then invited fans to submit their requests.
When asked about what the other parts of the campaign will bring, Wujkowski says “hopefully we’ll get to see some of our favourite Super Rugby stars grooming miniature horses, practicing ballet and laying down some tracks”.
2degrees is also a sponsor of Super Rugby, of all five New Zealand Super Rugby teams.
In its campaign with DDB, it took the stance that New Zealand is always chatting about rugby “and we’d like to keep it that way”.
By using a selection of popular memes and focusing heavily on social media, 2degrees is showing it’s down with the kids.
