Looking Back at When KFC and Ogilvy Made a Meal of the 2018 World Cup

Other than France lifting the trophy of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, what’s the one thing that will forever be remembered about the tournament?

Often, one would say they remember the spectacular goals or the crazy celebrations that followed them, or talk about a team’s comeback from the brink of elimination to go on and make it to the final. But, in 2018, one man stole the show which, in turn, allowed a brand who wasn’t a sponsor of the tournament to do the same. Neymar will forever be synonymous with KFC.

A simple Google search will prove it, where page after page of articles, pictures and videos discuss and compare the one thing that links the two – the similarities in Neymar’s dive with that of the ‘hero’ in the KFC ad.

Steven Lipschitz, copywriter at Ogilvy Cape Town said, “We came up with the big idea at the end of 2017. We were watching some footballers diving on a field and I said ‘wow these guys are really making a meal of it’ and the penny dropped.”

“Neymar was a catalyst for it to go viral, but it was orchestrated. A dive is so divisive, yet it attracted people who both love and hate football. So we could tap into a market that wasn’t even part of the consumer audience. It also took some smart thinking to get this piece in the right place for the masses to pick up on it.” And Alex Goldberg, creative director of Ogilvy Cape Town, was right.

From the moment Neymar did his spectacular dive, the stars aligned for KFC and their ad went viral, reaching every corner of the globe. Within two weeks the ad was viewed by over 51 million people and it created over 3.9 billion impressions across TV, mobile, websites, blogs and social media.

People did speak about the ad, but did it help sell chicken? The campaign helped KFC increase the sales of their Streetwise 2 meal on offer by a massive 20%, resulting in an extra million pieces of chicken being sold. Talk about making a meal of it.