Super Weird Campaign

I am working on something small and fun about what is possibly the weirdest campaign I’ve written about for since starting at ClickZ. Romanian KFC launched a website yesterday that translates to “Don’t panic, man” that automatically scans Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, etc., and if any of the sites crash… the site changes to have a big button that will send a digital coupon for a free KFC meal to your phone. The idea behind it is that lack of online communication is a huge deal to their target demo and this is softening the blow? I guess?

This is clearly a stunt, the first goal of which is publicity. From that perspective, it’s succeeding—after all, ClickZ is writing about it!

But I’m not sure it’s wise to build your brand on the basis of schadenfreude. Surely, there are ways to offer free food that don’t entail riding roughshod over and antagonizing the biggest Internet companies in the world.

On the other hand, this is a unique case study in real-time, mobile marketing. It’ll be interesting to see how the campaign shakes out.

Addendum: Success!