When KFC Made a Comeback Sound Like One
When KFC brought back the Twister Wrap earlier this year, it wasn't just relaunching a menu item — it was resurrecting a genuine 90s and 2000s favorite that fans had been asking for on social media for years. The problem with any "we're back" campaign is that nostalgia alone doesn't guarantee attention. People say they miss things all the time and still scroll past the ad announcing their return.
KFC's goal wasn't to explain the comeback. It was to make people feel it — to turn a product relaunch into something that sounded as familiar and catchy as the food itself used to be.
The strategy leaned on a duo already trusted for exactly this kind of moment: the TurnUp Twins, Minnie and Mattie, who'd built their name by spontaneously writing an unprompted jingle for Crumbl Cookie back in 2024 — a video that's since crossed 80 million views on TikTok. They weren't hired as spokespeople in the traditional sense. They were hired because they'd already proven they could make a brand sound like a song stuck in your head, without it feeling like an ad.
Execution stayed simple on purpose. The Twins wrote and performed an original jingle for the Twister Wrap in their signature style — harmonized, sweet, a little playful — evoking the exact kind of brand jingles that used to run on TV decades ago, back when the Twister was first popular. That's the clever bit: the format of the ad (a hummable jingle) matched the era the product itself was nostalgic for. The medium and the message were telling the same story.
The results back up the instinct. The collaboration pulled in over 15,000 engagements across TikTok and Instagram, and when KFC posted the video on its own brand account, it saw a 4% engagement rate — against an average of roughly 0.25% for similar fast-food brand content. That's not a small bump; that's a campaign performing sixteen times better than the category norm. Comment sections filled with people quoting the jingle back, the clearest sign a sonic idea has actually landed — people weren't just watching, they were repeating it.
The real lesson isn't "hire someone who went viral once." It's that KFC picked creators whose entire skill was making a brand feel hummable, then let them do the one thing they're known for, without overproducing it into a polished ad. The nostalgia did half the job. The song did the rest.
What this means for a brand like yours: Sound is one of the most underused assets in influencer marketing, especially for brands sitting on a nostalgic product, a signature moment, or even just a recognizable name. You don't need a celebrity duet — you need a creator who already knows how to turn a brand into three hummable lines. A jewellery label re-launching a signature collection, a restaurant bringing back an old favourite, a hotel marking an anniversary, all of these have a "comeback" story worth putting to music instead of just captioning it.
