‘The Mountain’ plays the beefiest chicken pitchman to date.
KFC’s new Double Crispy Colonel Sandwich is, as the name implies, an unnerving tower of two chicken patties encased (unlike the infamous Double Down) in a bun. Obviously no mere celebrity iteration of Colonel Sanders is up to the job of selling this beast, so they’re bringing in some added muscle.
Enter Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, an international strongman best known for playing Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane in HBO’s Game of Thrones series. While his face doesn’t get much screen time on the show, especially since the character’s near-death (ahem) experience in the fourth season, his imposing physique has been a mainstay of the fantasy epic since it launched in 2011.
The Mountain’s silence may cover up Björnsson’s Icelandic accent, but here it’s explained away through a Double Colonel backstory about how he left his native Kentucky as a child and went to Iceland “to train, to become more—twice more.”
But will that be enough to pull a supposed world record number of Double Crispy Colonel Sandwiches (weighing 700 pounds or so) across a room? Probably, given that this “challenge” was completely invented by the brand and has no actual record-setting implications at all. But let’s find out!
OK, so he can move a lot of sandwiches across the room, but can he move a lot of sandwiches in stores? (Writer high-fives himself for wordplay.)
While the idea of two fried chicken patties may seem a bit much, KFC says it’s a natural extension of the approach burger places have been taking for years.
“We launched the Crispy Colonel Sandwich a few months ago and we believe it is the best chicken sandwich in the market,” says Andrea Zahumensky, CMO of KFC U. S. “Burger places have been selling double burgers for years, but nobody has really had a chicken sandwich like this worthy of doubling up on—so we decided to change the extra crispy fried chicken game by creating the Double Crispy Colonel.
To help bolster its swole new spokesman, KFC also launched an influencer outreach effort for the new sandwich, hitting up EXTREEEME food reviewers on YouTube to boost the Double Crispy Colonel hype:
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David Griner
@griner
David Griner is creative and innovation editor for Adweek. He’s been covering agencies, creativity, technology and marketing innovation for more than a decade and is host of Adweek’s podcast.
