Beyond Belief: A Fresh Helping of KFC Weirdness

Eggspect the un-eggspected! This year, there's an IRL 'Test of Faith'

Is KFC’s chicken cult back for more? You better believe it.

The concept of belief powered KFC’s recent U.K. and Ireland campaigns, with freaky dancing hens and freakier gravy baptisms generating headlines and some controversy.

Now, Mother London and director Vedran Rupic return with a sequel that finds blindfolded “believers” seeking a golden egg. They race through late-night streets in a cray quest that can only end one way … airborne and feathered:

“This year, the ambition was to open up ‘Believe’ to the public and get them involved,” Tomas Coleman, ECD at Mother, tells Muse. “So, rather than launching this campaign with a film in the traditional sense, we looked at it more as an invitation to act.”

“A group of people put their blind faith in chicken to the test, and the person who believes strongest has that faith rewarded with the golden egg. Which has been a recurring theme in the ‘Believe’ world,” he says. “The audience is then faced with the question, ‘How much do you believe in chicken?'”

A QR code leads to an IRL “test of faith” set for coming months.

“Just like in the film, the one person who proves their belief to be the strongest will float away with the golden egg—which is worth £50,000.”

Presumably, the winner won’t be suspended high above the Earth by a chicken. But you never know.

“Vedran took that gamified take on the campaign and turned it into the logic of the world, where there are some sort of otherworldly forces trying to get in the way of the contestants, eliminating those whose faith falters,” says Coleman. Such notions will play into the IRL contest.

The team chose “to shoot everything practically to give the world a playful yet grounded feeling,” says Derek Man Lui, also an agency ECD.

“The boulders are really rolling down the hill and the lightning is a towering LED strip that strikes our man in the trench coat. We could’ve done it all in post or used AI, but you wouldn’t feel the stakes of each obstacle.”

Indeed, the :90 offers edgy fun. Its absurdist mad dash should spark wide-spread interest and give the approach renewed wings. Bwaaaak!