We needed to launch Colonel Sanders, an absolutely unknown character in the market at the time, to the Russian audience. Colonel Sanders doesn’t waste time speaking about himself, he uses it to speak about his chicken. So we came up with a catchy line “Chicken is crunch, Chicken is taste” (it rhymes in Russian “Курица хруст. Курица вкус”) and made the Colonel to perform a fun song about it.

Here’s me performing the first draft version of the song for the clients presentation, Jake Barnes on the guitar:

The most interesting part of the launch for me was developing the Colonel’s backstory, merging what we learned about the real character with Russian culture. We filled his office with artefacts like a portrait of the Colonel by Kazimir Malevich, a Colonel-Matryoshka, a painting “Morning in a Pine Forest” where we replaced the bears with chickens, or books like “The Golden Drumstick” (referring to “The Golden Calf”) or “The Master and Chicken” (referring to “The Master and Margarita”).

Alongside the launch film we made a bunch of fun 5 seconders, in each one the Colonel performed our line “Chicken is crunch, Chicken is taste” in different genres.

We shot some fun stills with the awesome Robbie Augspurger.

The song went quite viral, and Russian kids began stealing Colonel Sanders cut-outs from KFC stores all over the country. Some used him for their fried chicken cult, some even took him to a football game.

After the launch of Colonel Sanders, we went on a production marathon coming up with quick, cheap, fun and simple ideas.

Here’s a Tiki Colonel for the summer extension of the campaign, or a Crazy Colonel promoting meals with insane discounts:

Backpack Colonel for collaboration between KFC and Russian food delivery service:

Hot Colonel introducing his piping hot grilled meals:

Romantic Colonel, Low budget Colonel and so much more:

Throughout these projects, I worked with many talented people like Albert Thierry, Cal Al-Jorani, Scott Smith, Gina Onegina, Jeffrey Max from Fatal Farm or Robbie Augspurger.