Just how far will people go for the taste of KFC?
That was the key question when Ogilvy South Africa and KFC announced the launch of an integrated ‘Beyond the Sea’ campaign.
The campaign was inspired by the South Africans who spend more than a year on remote Marion Island in the service of science.
Marion Island, the tip of an undersea volcano 2,209km south-east of Cape Town, is one of South Africa’s farthest-flung territories. It’s the Antarctic research base for teams of scientists who spend 13 months at a time there studying sea birds, seals, meteorology and space.
The campaign is a cinematic masterpiece depicting life on Marion Island. It begins with a video call from researcher Mzuli Ntuli to his friends and family, who are enjoying a meal of KFC in South Africa.
Watch the video below:
Ntuli and his colleague, Samantha then decide to set sail to the mainland in a dinghy – clutching a shopping list from their fellow islanders to buy takeouts for themselves and the rest of the team.
The campaign depicts them being escorted by dolphins, battling seasickness, and facing rough seas.
The initial unbranded component of the campaign gives Marion Island scientists the opportunity to talk about their work, which involves saving threatened and endangered species and studying climate change and even the origins of the universe.
KFC Africa Chief Marketing Officer Grant Macpherson said: “When we discovered that there’s a part of South Africa where you can’t get KFC and that a group of people give up a year of their lives to live and work on Marion Island, we realised we had the scenario for an epic adventure in the turbulent Atlantic Ocean.”
He added: “We know that our customers will go to great lengths for our finger-lickin’ good food and we wanted to honour that devotion in a great story”.
IOL Lifestyle
Sarene.Kloren@IOL.co.za