The climax of the National Football League season is also the height of the chicken-wing-eating season, and Kentucky Fried Chicken formalized that, unveiling its new role as official wing sponsor of the NFL playoffs and Super Bowl.
The sponsorship gives KFC license to post the NFL shield logo and Super Bowl XLIII logos on its wings buckets and on 32-ounce NFL beverage cups, which will also be the key to a Super Bowl sweepstakes. TV spots are planned for the playoffs, but KFC isn’t saying whether it will be a player with an ad in the Big Game itself.
The TV campaign commences during NFL games on Dec. 28, when the NFL-branded wings buckets, cups and other branded packaging will initially appear.
Anyone who buys a soda in one of those 32-ounce cups will have a shot at a trip to the 2010 Super Bowl, along with other prizes, including flat-panel TVs and NFL.com gift certificates.
KFC restaurant signage will push its new NFL profile along with the planned TV spots.
“It’s prime wing-eating season, and as a restaurant that sells more wings than any other restaurant, it’s really the dream partnership,” KFC spokesman Rick Maynard says.
Maynard declined to say whether the new KFC-NFL relationship would fly beyond this season.
This is KFC’s first official NFL sponsorship role. But it did stage an end-run promotion around last year’s Super Bowl, offering to donate $260,000 to its Colonel’s Scholars college scholarship fund in the name of any player who danced like a chicken in the end zone after scoring a touchdown in the big game. However, no player on the New York Giants or New England Patriots flapped his arms.
The National Chicken Council estimates that American football fans chow down more than 90 million pounds of chicken wings during Super Bowl weekend. That breaks down to 720 million wings — more than two for each person in the country.
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