KFC

KFC is one of the world’s most recogisable brands, serving millions of customers globally with its iconic Original Reciple chicken.

The Challenge

How do you make every pound of paid media spend work harder, while learning exactly what motivates a hungry, distracted, scrolling audience to act?

For KPC, that was the brief.

The Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) industry is one of the most competitive ad environments anywhere. Customers are scrollers, swipers and skippers, and even strong ad campaigns can get lost in the noise. KFC’s Craveable Core OLV campaign was already performing well, but the brand wanted more than incremental wins. The team wanted evidence-based ad insights to inform every creative decision, and they wanted them in real-time, not in a post campaign report.

At the same time, KFC was working hard to grow its mobile ordering app. Cost-per-install from Facebook ads needed to come down, and the team needed to understand which creative triggers were actually driving downloads. Guesswork wasn’t going to cut it.

The challenge came down to three connected goals:

Drive down the cost-per-install of the KFC app from Facebook ad campaigns
Deliver real consumer insight into which creative triggers led to performance
Further optimise the already-successful Craveable Core OLV campaign and find ways to scale ads more efficiently.

Key Obstacles

A lack of real-time, evidence-based ad insights to inform its creative decisions
No means to identify the creative triggers driving conversions
No context from social listening to inform its digital campaign ideas

‘Turning to automation helped us to be more human and develop more empathy to our customers. Automated Creative helped us bring a performance mentality to our creative, whilst adding brand rigour and craft to our performance marketing. We didn’t replace the creative, we optimised it with a continuous feedback loop that delivered results far beyond our expectations’

Jack Hinchliffe

Marketing Director, KFC UK & Ireland

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The Strategy

For Craveable Core, we started with social listening, mapping the emotional landscape around takeaway and KFC moments. That listening layer gave us cultural intelligence about what people were actually craving, joking about and sharing online. We turned those signals into a steady stream of ad campaign creative ideas that informed KFC’s digital marketing strategy and shaped the messaging, visuals and tone of every asset that followed.

For the mobile ordering app, Automated Creative ran a systematic, data-led testing programme across Facebook. Every visual, message and app feature was tested in-market to see what actually drove downloads. Using our platform, Creator, we produced over 100 targeted ads that reflected live social conversations and deployed them at scale.

This is where the AC secret sauce kicks in. Creator doesn’t just automate output, it enhances it. Every ad asset was tagged so we could understand why creative was working, not just what was working. That gave KFC a complete view of online ad optimisation: which messages, visual cues and product hooks were earning attention, and which were quietly using it.

Because we optimise ad creative in real time, KFC could react in-flight, adjusting messaging mid-campaign for the first time, based on hard evidence rather than instinct. Cheaper paid media became a live test bed for what should go into the more expensive media. The result was a continuous optimisation loop: test, learn, refine, scale.

By blending social listening, automation and traditional ad craft, we created ad content that reflected the needs, wants, and desires of the KFC audience. We did this at scale, and with measurable accountability.

+193%

Improvement Against Benchmark

Measuring the KFC app download campaign
-45%

Cheaper media costs than BAU
+52%

Increase in site traffic
- 120%
  
  Increase in CTR on Meta ad performance

The Result

The AC approach turned KFC’s paid media into an evidence engine, and the numbers followed almost immediately. On the mobile ordering app, the systematic testing programme delivered a 193% improvement on KFC’s performance benchmark, proving that the right ad optimisation tool- paired with the right testing discipline- could shift cost-per-install dramatically when every creative decision was informed by hard data rather than instinct.

Craveable Core saw an equally striking shift. The campaign came in 45% more cost effective than KFC’s business-as-usual marketing, drove 52.2% more site traffic than BAU and landed 120% above the CTR target. Most tellingly, the same media spend generated over 21.5k more sit visits than KFC’s standard approach. This is proof that intelligent campaign optimisation can scale ads without scaling budget. The blend of social listening, automated testing and traditional craft meant that every pound of paid media worked harder, and every learning fed forward into the next round of creative.

Crucially, the work helped KFC become more human in how it speaks to customers, while becoming more efficient in how it spends. Jack Hinchcliife, Marketing Director at KFC for the UK&I, noted that ‘turning to automation helped us be more human and develop more empathy to our customers.’ The reactive, nimble approach to creating targeted ads gave the brand the confidence to optimise ad creative live, generate fresh ad content at speed and build ad assets that genuinely reflected what customers wanted to see. The result is a marketing operation where every ad campaign isn't just performing in the moment — it's actively making the next one smarter.

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Optimising paid media campaigns helped KFC understand its audience and use ad insights to fuel record-breaking performance

The Challenge

Key Obstacles

The Strategy

+193%

-45%

+52%

120%

The Result

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