Project Type
Client-commissioned

Agency
MRM//McCann

Client Name
KFC

Client URL
https://www.kfc.ro/

My Role in This Project
Growing up and graduating university in Romania, I knew lots of teens struggle with learning by the old and outdated methods used in schools. That’s why, in 2018 we gave kids a new tool to study with by hijacking the cryptocurrency system to invent Studycoin.

Working on a new virtual coin was an intense challenging project as its core essence was to mimic the behavior of crypto-currencies. It made me step up and take on more responsibilities besides art direction. I had to quickly sharpen my analytical and math skills as we teamed up with developers and math professors. Being one of the lead creatives, I spent countless hours in meetings, brainstorming and trying to come up with a working algorithm for the coin alongside my team.

I was also in charge of designing the online platform which sometimes required high UX/UI skills on my part. Due to budget and time constraints, I also took over the role of an illustrator and fully illustrated Studycoin’s branding and launching video tutorial, trying to make the illustrations as appealing as possible for youngsters.

It was all worth it as we managed to launch it in time for the exams and teens went crazy about it and reddit groups were created just to discuss the equations. The project was so successful it even continued in a second flight after I left the agency.

Project Description
Context:
The starting point of the project is the on-going educational crisis in Romania. In the past 5 years, only 64% of Romanian teenagers passed their final high-school exams. Part of the problem is that in this digital age, old school studying isn’t appealing anymore for teens. Traditional study methods have lost ground and students needed new methods to train their skills.

Idea:
That’s why KFC, the brand that is all about youngsters, decided to support them and make learning fun again for them. We picked math, the hardest one of the exam subjects and hijacked the trend everyone was talking about at that time: crypto-coins.

We introduced Studycoin, the coin teens could mine using their most powerful processor they owned: their brains. We launched a platform where we invited students to solve over 3.000 unique math problems, all submitted by teachers from the Romanian Mathematical Sciences Society. Each correct answer gives them coins which can be exchanged for KFC products, making the campaign achieve its double objective: it helps teens prep for the exams and it also increases store traffic and fan loyalty.

Just like a real crypto-coin, the value of a studycoin varies daily and depends on the number of problems solved the previous day. The students can speculate and transform studycoins in discounts within the KFC network in Romania at any given moment.

Results:
Studycoin became a hype as teenagers created special groups trying to hack the system and solve equations together. There were 567.156 answers submitted, 75.620 hours of problem solving, 266.700 studycoins won and 3.725 KFC items bought with the coin. Due to its popularity, a second flight of the program was launched again in 2019.