The Cranky Creative cries fowl over some of the most annoying ads on TV.
You know the ones. Those loud, obnoxious TV ads featuring Norm MacDonald, Darrell Hammond, and more recently, even Reba McEntire delivering profane imitations of the company’s iconic founder.
These are horrible works that must surely have the real Colonel spinning in his grave like a rotisserie chicken.
As Entrepreneur magazine put it:
The new Colonel is a caricature, carefully choreographed by the company and its creative hired hands. Instead of resurrecting the Colonel to lead KFC’s sales back to their former fried glory, the company has instead unleashed a childish pantomime that people old enough to remember Colonel Sanders don’t like and people too young to know him can’t possibly understand.
—“KFC Doubles Down on a Dumb Ad Campaign”
Particularly offensive to me is an ad called “Deep Breath.” For this spot, the sadists at agency Wieden & Kennedy have produced 15 seconds of rapidly escalating aggravation.
The Colonel, played by funny guy Jim Gaffigan, stands behind a table set with five cardboard-boxed KFC meals on silver platters. As he moves down the table from one plate to the next, he drawls gratingly:
Real meal for five bucks.
Real meal for five bucks.
Real meal for five bucks.
Real meal for five bucks.
Real meal for five bucks.
Deep breath. And then, in rapid-fire cadence:
FINGER-LICKIN’
FINGER-LICKIN’
FINGER-LICKIN’
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!
My physiological response to this is always the same: an immediate and overwhelming urge to choke the living shit out of someone.
All right, KFC. You have captured my attention. But at what cost?
By the time the ad has ended, that last word ringing in my ears, I am provoked. As far as I am concerned, KFC and its agency have come into my home uninvited and assaulted me aurally with weapons-grade stupidity.
And now they want me to reward them with my business?
Flock off.
Newsflash, turkeys: You cannot irritate me into buying from you.
But get this, dear reader: KFC disagrees. As the Entrepreneur article states, the company’s own research suggests that one in five people actively hate the campaign.
And that’s just fine by Yum Brands CEO Greg Creed, who said he was “very excited that this work is really distinctive and disruptive.”
He got the last part right, at least.
Crowed Creed: “I am actually quite happy that 20 percent hate it, because now they at least have an opinion. They’re actually talking about KFC, and you can market to love and hate; you cannot market to indifference.”
Good strategy, Mr. Creed. Maybe you can get a job writing fortune-cookie messages for the China Palace after the shareholders kick you out at Yum.
It will happen if that 20-percent figure—which should already be giving every member of the management team a bad case of indigestion—grows to 25 percent, 30 percent or more.
The folks at Chick-fil-A must be clucking ecstatic.
Review score: One jive turkey out of five.
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What do you think? Has KFC laid an egg with these ads? Or are they poultry in motion? Sound off in the comments section below.
I grew up eating Kentucky Fried Chicken! Since these ridiculous, insult to my intelligence commercials have bombarded our TV, I have not spent one dime at a KFC. All of our families takeout chicken business now goes to Chick Fil A and Popeyes. KFC is dead to us…
Friend, you are not alone. Web forums and social media are full of people just like you who have sworn off entire brands simply because the advertising is annoying as hell. Oh, I’m sure many of the bigwigs at these companies (such as Yum Brands CEO Greg Creed) believe “it’s no big deal, at least we’re getting the word out, we won’t miss the minuscule percentage of customers who don’t like our commercials” — but I think that’s the wrong attitude. It’s never good for business when a company causes its customers to have a bad experience. Some companies need to find this out the hard way.
Thanks for reading!
Just watched some of the ads. The Norm MacDonald ads were better than I expected, but still bad, particularly those where he illogically pretends not to be pretending to be the colonel, though the lie detector test ad was probably the worst of the lot. The Darrell Hammond ad from 2015 was cringeworthy and I’m still trying to figure out what I was seeing while watching the Reba McEntire ad. I don’t dare check out any of the others I found while searching for these, as those might prove my intellectual undoing. The only good from these ads is that except for the Reba ad, they at least made an effort to stay on point.
If I’m thinking good national stage ads for food right now, I’m thinking Chick-Fil-A, where the ads, long or short, get right to the point and aren’t insulting my intelligence. Whether or not the testimonials are genuine is irrelevant, since they are all about selling the food Chick-Fil-A makes and don’t try to go onto some kind of stupid tangent that makes no sense or fails to fit what the company is about.