Along with rooster, KFC is frying up controversy.
On August 24 Azim Akhtar, KFC Canada’s Director of Advertising, tweeted a number of billboard photos from the corporate’s new “It’s finger lickin’ good” marketing campaign.
Whereas the advertisements are imagined to be playful, suggesting that utensils aren’t wanted to take pleasure in KFC, X customers shortly identified that the entire photos featured Black folks consuming fried rooster and feed into dangerous stereotypes.
Upon receiving the pushback, Akhtar took to X to make clear that the print photos had been a part of a broader marketing campaign and shared a video model of the advert that featured a various group of actors casting apart utensils to take pleasure in KFC with their fingers.
Although sharing the video was an try to offer broader context, it left social media customers questioning why the artistic used on the billboards didn’t replicate the range of the business. Different commentators speculated that the imagery was deliberately used to fire up controversy.
The Significance of Culturally Competent Advertising
Whereas fried rooster will not be inherently racial, North America has a historical past of stereotyping the consumption of fried rooster by Black folks, utilizing it as a demeaning trope. Failing to take this historic context into consideration is unquestionably a misstep for the model.
We noticed one other instance earlier this summer time in the course of the Barbie film’s promo. The official X account for the Warner Bros. movie shared light-hearted responses to fan-made photos of Barbie and Oppenheimer. The transfer was seen as distasteful to Japanese audiences given the historical past of nuclear weapons utilized in Japan throughout World Struggle II. Warner Bros. later issued an apology for the insensitive engagement.
These examples present the significance of culturally competent advertising. To keep away from errors like this sooner or later, advertising groups ought to intention to:
- Perceive related historic context and the way totally different demographics could also be impacted by a chunk of context
- Enlist various groups with entrepreneurs of various backgrounds and experiences who can present mandatory insights
- Continually look at, query, and deconstruct biases that will present up of their content material
Whereas outrage can contribute to virality, not all engagement is sweet engagement. Culturally insensitive content material breaks the viewers’s belief and may overshadow probably constructive experiences a buyer can have with a model.
