Mother Celebrate The Whole Chicken In First KFC Ad

In their first work for KFC since winning the brand from BBH, Mother London create a campaign titled The Whole Chicken, hoping to highlight the quality of meat that the fast food brand uses by trying some radical approaches.

The campaign is led by a The Whole Chicken TV ad, directed by Siri Bunford of Knucklehead, which features a number of chickens (or bad mothapluckas, if you will) in a barnyard take on hip-hop song X Gon' Give It To Ya by DMX. Just as KFC want to emphasise that they use real quality chicken in all their restaurants, the ad uses real chickens rather than CGI, with animal trainers using a selection of methods including treats and wobbly platforms to get the chickens to seem to dance to the song.

This ad marks the first time that the chain has made a live chicken the hero of one of its commercial, a radical and potentially controversial mode for any company selling meat, but especially one that has historically been haunted by some false but long-lasting stories about the quality of that meat.

However, there is precedent for this approach, with McDonald's (fighting a similar reputation about poor-quality meat) showing cows in their 2015 ad by Leo Burnett The Cow [above].

It seems like KFC are also hoping for the same minor backlash that that former ad received. After people complained to the Advertising Standards Agency that the farms shown in the commercial were misleadingly large and spacious, the company was given a platform to talk about meat quality, with the ASA ruling that the ad was not misleading acting like an official confirmation. However, it remains to be seen whether KFC will be given the same platform.

Aside from the TV ad, Mother have also created a whole series of OOH work. This includes a new approach to food photography [right], moving away from the white infinity backgrounds and plastic-looking burgers and over to a more natural-looking, Instagram-inspired layout, complete with crumbs, ruffled napkins, and subtler Pepsi branding.

Alongside these print ads, Mother are also in the process of producing a mural series outside of their East London offices [above]. Each day, a wall will be repainted with a new chicken-focused mural designed by street artists including INSA, McBess, Shotopop and Barrass. Then, using an app named Gif-iti, these will be animated together to create a procession of brightly coloured cluckers.