The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2021–2022
Chicken Licken's 'Lotto, Loan Shark, Rasta' sells SoulBites as nuggets of wisdom
Chicken Licken launches SoulBites with films of people at bad decisions, chewing a nugget to see the disastrous consequences before choosing well.
Chicken Licken
What it had to solve
For the launch of its new SoulBites bite-size chicken nuggets, Chicken Licken needed people to see the snack as not called nuggets for nothing — packed with soul, and with wisdom, too.
How it works
People do not always stop to consider the consequences of the decisions they are about to make, and sometimes that ends badly. Chicken Licken's launch of SoulBites — bite-size chicken nuggets — turned that human flaw into a comedy premise: the new snack is packed not only with soul, but with wisdom too, and the ads insist it is not called a nugget for nothing.
The launch films, whose first three entries are titled Lotto, Loan Shark and Rasta, each introduce a character facing a tricky choice. When the character pauses to chew a SoulBite, the nugget of wisdom reveals the potentially disastrous consequences of the wrong decision — and they take the right one, making the snack the source of street-smart judgment.
The campaign gave a new product an instantly repeatable joke and South African audiences the brand's signature humour: serious subjects, such as the dangers of borrowing from a loan shark, delivered tongue-in-cheek, bite-size, and tied to the product itself.
Why it lands
- The double meaning of 'nugget' supplies the whole idea: the snack is literally a bite of wisdom, so the advertising and the product are the same sentence.
- Showing the disastrous consequences inside the character's pause makes the warning entertaining instead of preachy, which fits the brand's comic tone.
- Naming the films after the characters' situations turns everyday bad decisions into repeatable, recognisable sketches anyone can retell.
- Because the wisdom arrives by eating the product, every scene ends with an order rather than a slogan.
What it did
The double meaning — a nugget as a piece of knowledge — gave a snack launch a running gag about street wisdom, and the films' casting won a D&AD Wood Pencil at the 2022 awards.
What you can take
A product word with a second meaning can carry a whole campaign: once a snack is literally a nugget of wisdom, every comic scene of a bad choice re-sells the bite.
Since then
The campaign launched in South Africa in November 2021 and rolled out across media platforms into 2022. At the D&AD Awards in May 2022, Joe Public United won a Wood Pencil for Casting/Performance for the Lotto, Loan Shark and Rasta films. The archive entry records no sales figures; the case stands on making a snack the literal source of decision-making wisdom.
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