This week was a pretty busy marketing week for Yum! Brands, the umbrella company of KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Long John Silver’s and A&W All-American Foods. Just with two very key media placements, the Kentucky Derby and The Oprah Winfrey Show, Yum! was seen by approximately 20+ million Americans* – and that’s just through live television! However, that figure doesn’t take into account millions of additional consumer touchpoints: the thousands of spectators at Churchill Downs surrounded by Yum!’s red speak bubble logo on signage and the numbered blankets each horse was wearing, and the 2,000 coupons for Kentucky Grilled Chicken downloaded from Oprah.com each minute since the announcement. Even Twitter lists the KFC promotion as the third most tweeted topic as of this past Wednesday.
However, Yum!’s high profile sponsorship of the Kentucky Derby and its Kentucky Grilled Chicken promotion on Oprah may have some scratching their heads. First, many consumers may not have been aware that Yum! owns KFC, and for those who did, they may be questioning Yum!’s strategy: Why sponsor “the two greatest minutes in sports”? Why promote on Oprah? What are they selling? Who’s their target?
Jonathan Blum, senior vice president and chief public affairs office for Yum! Brands, told vitaminIMC that both campaigns make sense and “the introduction [of Kentucky Grilled Chicken] wasn’t timed to coincide with the Derby – that was a coincidence.”
Nowadays, any product featured on Oprah is going to get great traction. As Blum said, “[the Kentucky Grilled Chicken promotion] was a homerun!” Plus, Yum! has been sponsoring the Kentucky Derby since 2006 and uses the event to “reach high-net-worth individual investors” at a price that costs less than half the price of a 30-second Super Bowl commercial. Yum! also uses the Kentucky Derby as a corporate event to entertain franchisees, investors and hardworking general managers right in its own Louisville, KY backyard.
But, while Yum!’s goal is to sell as many drumsticks, personal pan pizzas and chalupas as they can, this week should make large multinational and multidivisional corporations wonder if they could have done more with opportunities such as these. Sure, Yum! couldn’t ask for anything more by getting Oprah to promote one of their products. But, should a company like Yum! look into how they communicate across divisions and see if leveraging its assets can sell more product and strengthen the overall brand?
--Lauren McCabe
*Note: Total audience measurement compiled from Nielsen’s estimates of 14 million viewers of the live broadcast of the 2009 Kentucky Derby on NBC and the average 6 million viewer The Oprah Winfrey Show receives each week with Live + SD ratings measurement.
