Mayday! Mayday!

Find out how a novel advertising campaign by popular fast food chain KFC led (initially) to public confusion and then to a R50 000 donation to the NSRI…

What would you do if your favourite radio show was interrupted by an emergency signal calling for help at sea?

It just so happens that we know what many South Africans would do because they did: pick up the phone and alert the NSRI!

That’s exactly what happened when popular restaurant chain KFC aired a series of radio advertisements that mimicked a radio call for help at sea, as part of a campaign inspired by South African scientists who spend more than a year on remote Marion Island for research.

The central question of the campaign was, “How far will people go for the taste of KFC?” and featured two scientists going to great lengths to get home.

While the campaign was branded and clearly identifiable as advertising on other platforms, the radio ads so convincingly mimicked a maritime distress signal, without any mention of KFC, that some members of the public took the signals to be real and subsequently contacted the NSRI’s Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) to alert us.

“The EOC was really confused for a while,” says the NSRI’s head of marketing, Bradley Seaton-Smith. “Over a few days, they received calls reporting a distress signal near Marion Island, but neither the EOC nor any of our stations had picked up the signal.”

Just to be sure, the NSRI launched an investigation in collaboration with the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre, diverting resources to try and discover the source of the call, but to no avail.

Until, that is, someone made the connection, and to everyone’s great relief, the source of the signal was discovered: A KFC radio advert!

The NSRI marketing team responded on X with a ‘radio signal’ of our own, gently chiding KFC SA – which replied with a clever and unexpected response: a pledge, in morse code, to donate R25 000 to the NSRI to make up for the confusion.

KFC Senior Marketing Manager Mukundi Munzhelele handed a cheque for R50,000 to National Sea Rescue Institute CEO Dr Cleeve Robertson after a function at the V&A Waterfront Sea Rescue station in Cape Town on 25 May 2024. The generous donation from KFC followed a well-intentioned false alarm about a mid-Atlantic emergency, sparked by radio teasers for KFC’s “Beyond the Sea” campaign.