O’Conall Street

 

 A couple of Irish boys entered the PR pantheon of the greats for a campaign which was described by the Guardian Media Awards  judges as showing “bold disregard for conventional marketing techniques”

The creative PR brains behind Kentucky Fried Chicken’s ‘Face From Space’ are Nick Woods and James Kelly, both colleagues of mine at Weber Shandwick. James is half Ballymena and Nick hails from Holywood, Co Down. Weber Shadwick shunned the competition with a stunt designed to capture a global audience. “It enabled the brand to gain worldwide attention without the complication of language” the judges said.

The giant 87,500 square foot KFC logo was assembled in the Nevada desert last year and claimed to be the first brand logo visible from space.

The Weber Shandwick team faced huge operational difficulties which started with trying to find a supplier who could build the thing and getting right materials in the right colours. The original build site flooded two weeks before launch and the whole thing had to be shifted from Utah to Nevada. The team hired a commercial satellite to take images from space and worked very hard to keep a lid on the idea until they were ready to launch one story around the world at one moment in time.

They worked up two stories, worlds biggest logo and first logo visible from space. The trick was they could both only be told by showing the image. The story being the image meant cultural and language barriers were instantly overcome.

The story was launched out of New York via the international wires, in London via UK/Euro wires and out of Shanghai for Asia and got picked up everywhere. And I mean everywhere - every country you can think of, TV, print, radio, online, media sites, social network sites and consumer blogs. Google the image and its still there. Go onto Youtube and you can watch it being built as the clip above demonstrates.

The end result was huge opportunities to see (literally billions globally), an enormous return on investment, a number of awards in Europe the US and a very happy client.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Business, Consumer, Public Relations, Technology, The Media, Weber Shandwick. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.