Original Fake Games
View the case- Brand
- KFC
- Year
- 2025
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Arcade & Action
- Platform
- App
- Agency
- TBWA\RAAD
- With
- Eterna
Objective
KFC wanted a genuine foothold in mobile gaming — the space where GCC's Gen Z audience actually lives — not as a sponsor bolted onto someone else's game, but as a publisher of its own. The starting point was a widely shared frustration: players download the flashy mobile-game ads promising thrilling gameplay, only to delete the app minutes later because the real game bears no resemblance to what was advertised. KFC set out to fix that specific breach of trust by advertising exactly what the game delivers, and delivering exactly what it advertised.
Solution
Player downloads Original Fake Games free on iOS or Android and lands on a menu of four mini-games — The One with Rolling Barrels, The Trapped King One, The One with the Giant Pin, and The Weird Tennis One — each one a faithful, playable rebuild of a mobile-game ad players have seen and been burned by before, now starring Colonel Sanders in place of the original characters. Player picks a title, plays a short round built around the exact mechanic that ad promised, and gets a result at the end of the run. From there it's back to the menu to try another mini-game or replay the same one for a better score. The look and feel — neon lighting, oversized type, exaggerated graphics — deliberately mirrors the bait-and-switch ads the app is answering, except this time the gameplay matches the pitch.
Results
Downloads came in 300% above KFC's expectations during the launch phase. The campaign beat its KPIs by 270% on launch day and lifted digital engagement by 55%. Per KFC's brand tracking, the campaign also made KFC the #1 QSR brand with the region's gaming target audience.
- 1
Players find the app through a programmatic ad mimicking the neon, oversized-typography look of classic fake mobile-game commercials, retargeted at viewers who just watched one such ad, or through a TikTok gaming influencer reviewing the games. Both routes lead to a free App Store listing — KFC Original Fake Games, no in-app purchases — pitched as turning those famous fake game ads into real, playable games.
- 2
Inside, a single hub holds four separate free mini-games — The One with Rolling Barrels, The Trapped King One, The One with the Giant Pin, and The Weird Tennis One — and players choose which to play.
- 3
In The One with the Giant Pin, players pull pins from a rig of suspended objects in the right order to set the contents moving, pairing matching KFC products (fried chicken with gravy, or raw chicken fillet with butter) so the resulting food drops into the bucket held by an animated Colonel Sanders.
- 4
In The Trapped King One, a trapped Colonel Sanders sits above a grid of food symbols — burger, fries, cola — while a timer counts down; players match identical symbols before time runs out to free him, across three levels each with its own hazard: a sea serpent, a lava pit, and an acid-breathing snowman.
- 5
The One with the Rolling Barrels recreates the campaign's most famous fake-ad scenario, a rolling-barrel obstacle course the creative director says looks simple in the original ad but plays very differently in practice; its exact controls aren't documented in public sources.
- 6
The Weird Tennis One was added to the hub after launch — absent from the original App Store description but shown in later screenshots and called a recent addition by reviewers — though its mechanics likewise aren't documented.
- 7
Each of the four games runs three levels and takes about 15 minutes to finish, adding up to a total session of roughly 5 to 15 minutes.
- 8
Scores feed into a global leaderboard, giving players a reason to come back and replay, while KFC layers in exclusive rewards and special offers as an in-app incentive on top of the game itself.
