A commercial featuring Elon senior Geoff Pilkington has been named the winner of a national contest to promote Kentucky Fried Chicken's popcorn chicken. The commercial will air Thursday, Oct. 2 during NBC's "Scrubs" and during FOX's telecast of the major league baseball playoffs. Details...
Pilkington and his friends, Nathan Brown and Joe Ackerman, started their own film company, Rouse Productions, several years ago. They developed the concept for the commercial after seeing the KFC contest advertised in early September.
“This summer, we decided instead of making movies, we would shoot short commercials, basically for the heck of it,” said Pilkington, of Ladue, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. The friends made speculative advertisements for companies like Krispy Kreme, then sent the spots to the companies.
“We didn’t get any feedback, really, but we were excited when we saw the KFC contest,” Pilkington says. Adapting their favorite concept from the Krispy Kreme spot to fit chicken rather than doughnuts, Pilkington acted in the commercial, Brown served as director and Ackerman wrote the script. They sent their entry to KFC and soon received a flurry of phone calls from the company.
“They wanted to be sure about the concepts, to make sure we had developed the props ourselves and hadn’t gotten them from a movie or something like that,” Pilkington, a theatre arts major, said.
On Sept. 24, KFC posted the ad, titled “Big Fish,” along with the two other finalists on its Web site, giving the public 24 hours to view the commercials and select a winner.
Pilkington received a call Wednesday morning, letting him know “Big Fish” had been selected as the winner. Brown, a student at Washington University, Ackerman, who attends the University of Illinois, and Pilkington will receive $10,000, which Pilkington says they will split among themselves, as well as a few others who acted or helped produce the spot.
To view the commercial, visit the link below and select the ad titled “Big Fish:”