KFC opened a pawnshop on Ponsonby Road where Aucklanders could exchange anything gold for fried chicken and its new Liquid Gold sauce. The gold didn’t even need to be real, which is fortunate because trading Nana’s jewellery for three tenders would be a fairly difficult thing to explain later.
Ponsonby has had vintage stores, wine bars, extremely expensive candles and enough places selling tiny plates to sustain a small European city. Last weekend it added something new: a KFC pawnshop.
For two days, Ponsonby had a pawnshop run by Colonel Sanders. You could walk in carrying something gold, hand it across the counter and leave with chicken, which is honestly a more understandable financial system than most things currently happening with crypto.
KFC called it The Colonel’s Liquid Gold Exchange, and the whole thing appeared at 177 Ponsonby Road to launch its new Liquid Gold dipping sauce. The rules were generous: real jewellery counted, but so did costume jewellery, gold wrappers, random trinkets and basically anything shiny enough to survive a fairly loose interpretation of the word gold.
Nobody was standing behind the counter checking karats or calling in an expert from Antiques Roadshow. KFC had simply taken the phrase Liquid Gold much too seriously and followed it all the way to its logical conclusion, which happened to be a fake financial institution selling fried chicken.
The sauce itself is a creamy, peppery addition to KFC’s boneless chicken range and had already built a bit of a following across the ditch. A normal launch probably would have involved glossy chicken photography, a few influencers dipping tenders into a tub and several people describing the sauce as “elite” in the comments, but KFC decided to build a pawnshop instead.
That is what makes the whole thing work. It is a stupidly simple joke, but somebody actually bothered to turn it into a place you could walk into rather than stopping at a clever social post and congratulating themselves in the meeting afterwards.
The idea also escaped the shop. PHD Aotearoa put gold posters around Auckland that people could physically tear pieces from and take into the exchange, while Special PR and Bastion Aotearoa worked across the activation and wider launch. The full campaign is explained here, although the nicest thing about it is that nobody really needs the explanation.
You have gold. KFC has chicken. For one weekend, the market had reached equilibrium.
KFC marketing director Leanne Too told Campaign Brief that if the sauce was called Liquid Gold, it deserved its own exchange. That is obviously nonsense, but it is exactly the right kind of nonsense because the line contains the whole idea and does not need an 18-slide deck to make it funny.
It helps that KFC has earned permission to behave like this. This is a company whose permanent spokesperson is a dead colonel, whose main product arrives in a bucket and whose brand has spent years understanding that fried chicken probably should not take itself particularly seriously.
Plenty of brands try to be weird and end up sounding like a social media manager has been given too much caffeine. KFC’s pawnshop does not feel like that because the stupidity fits the product, the name and the brand, so nobody needs to watch a bank or insurance company suddenly start saying “slay” online and wonder what happened in the strategy meeting.
For one weekend, a bit of fake gold from the bottom of your drawer could buy dinner. Considering what usually happens to fake gold from the bottom of your drawer, that is a pretty good return.
Ponsonby has had vintage stores, wine bars, extremely expensive candles and enough places selling tiny plates to sustain a small European city. Last weekend it added something new: a KFC pawnshop.
For two days, Ponsonby had a pawnshop run by Colonel Sanders. You could walk in carrying something gold, hand it across the counter and leave with chicken, which is honestly a more understandable financial system than most things currently happening with crypto.
KFC called it The Colonel’s Liquid Gold Exchange, and the whole thing appeared at 177 Ponsonby Road to launch its new Liquid Gold dipping sauce. The rules were generous: real jewellery counted, but so did costume jewellery, gold wrappers, random trinkets and basically anything shiny enough to survive a fairly loose interpretation of the word gold.
Nobody was standing behind the counter checking karats or calling in an expert from Antiques Roadshow. KFC had simply taken the phrase Liquid Gold much too seriously and followed it all the way to its logical conclusion, which happened to be a fake financial institution selling fried chicken.
The sauce itself is a creamy, peppery addition to KFC’s boneless chicken range and had already built a bit of a following across the ditch. A normal launch probably would have involved glossy chicken photography, a few influencers dipping tenders into a tub and several people describing the sauce as “elite” in the comments, but KFC decided to build a pawnshop instead.
That is what makes the whole thing work. It is a stupidly simple joke, but somebody actually bothered to turn it into a place you could walk into rather than stopping at a clever social post and congratulating themselves in the meeting afterwards.
The idea also escaped the shop. PHD Aotearoa put gold posters around Auckland that people could physically tear pieces from and take into the exchange, while Special PR and Bastion Aotearoa worked across the activation and wider launch. The full campaign is explained here, although the nicest thing about it is that nobody really needs the explanation.
You have gold. KFC has chicken. For one weekend, the market had reached equilibrium.
KFC marketing director Leanne Too told Campaign Brief that if the sauce was called Liquid Gold, it deserved its own exchange. That is obviously nonsense, but it is exactly the right kind of nonsense because the line contains the whole idea and does not need an 18-slide deck to make it funny.
It helps that KFC has earned permission to behave like this. This is a company whose permanent spokesperson is a dead colonel, whose main product arrives in a bucket and whose brand has spent years understanding that fried chicken probably should not take itself particularly seriously.
Plenty of brands try to be weird and end up sounding like a social media manager has been given too much caffeine. KFC’s pawnshop does not feel like that because the stupidity fits the product, the name and the brand, so nobody needs to watch a bank or insurance company suddenly start saying “slay” online and wonder what happened in the strategy meeting.
For one weekend, a bit of fake gold from the bottom of your drawer could buy dinner. Considering what usually happens to fake gold from the bottom of your drawer, that is a pretty good return.
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