KFC must have thought it had an easy win with this playful campaign. AI art generators have a tendency to generate an unconventional numbers of fingers on human hands, and more fingers means more finger lickin', right?
Leveraging its 'finger lickin' good' slogan, it invited customers to create and share AI-generated images of KFC meals on social media. Customers responded by holding up one single finger. The middle one.
Devised with Leo Burnett, the campaign encouraged customers to use the Meta AI image generator in Instagram to create AI images of hands eating KFC meals. It invited people to post the images and tag the brand. But people don't seem to have exactly gone wild for the idea.
KFC attempted to get the ball rolling by suggesting the prompt "Imagine a hand majestically holding some glistening KFC Georgia gold saucy nuggets". Replies on the post included "Imagine paying artists" and "imagine never getting rid of the saucy nuggets from the menu".
It tried again the next day with "Imagine a hand holding a clump of KFC honey sriracha saucy nuggets." To that someone replied: "Must be the laziest marketing I've ever seen." It didn't bother again. Looking back at the images that brand was tagged in on Instagram, it seems only two people were inspired to get on board, and one of them was an advertising agency.
It just shows that when it comes to AI, even something that seems an easy win can go down like lead balloon. There were several mistakes. First, KFC didn't offer any kind of reward. Free social exposure works best when it happens organically, like the McDonald's Grimmace shake trend. Second, it assumed people would want to post AI images of chicken nuggets on their Instagram feed, which I imagine most people do not.
It was also a bit late off the mark since many of the best AI image generators have got a lot better at generating the right number of fingers. We have seen some successful examples of campaigns that made use of AI-generated imagery, like KitKat, but they've tended to be critical. Although KFC was poking fun of a flaw in the tech's output, it was still encouraging people to use it.
For more AI news, see the controversy around the Autodesk AI generator and Absolut Vodka's weird AI fashion photo campaign.
