KFC Romania and McCann Romania are tackling the subject of social media addiction in a new short web series, Social Me.

Social Me is an online series about a Romanian character inspired by the authentic online behaviours of the selfie generation: staging perfect moments, filters over filters, carefully-scripted captions and the addiction to the instant gratification that the flood of 'likes' provide.

The series follows a fictional influencer as she struggles to reach her daily quota of posts and likes. To achieve these goals, she looks at the people in her life purely as a source of content. Her boyfriend? A human selfie stick. Her childhood friend? A pretext for an emotional caption. Her dog? The best 'like' magnet ever.

Monica Eftimie, chief marketing officer, Sphera Franchise Group, comments: “The culture of 'airbrushing' everything we do has led to a worrying statistic: more than 75% of social media users admit they make their lives seem more exciting online. The most vulnerable group? Teens. They turn to faking perfection online to escape their reality and simulate an ideal world. KFC stands for realness, not perfection, so we translated that into an online series meant to serve as a manifest for teens to not give in to the social pressure of having a perfect online life, to own their true selves."

Mihai Vasile, MRM// McCann Romania copywriter, said: “Our challenge was to build a narrative that everybody can relate to and, in the end, internalise the message: the perfect life is a mirage. We forget that, in this process of creating this utopic thing, we put filters on everything, we build a character that is so different from our true self. This is not a manifest against social media or 'likes', but against the pressure to behave in a way that we are not.”

SOCIAL ME is the first original series developed in partnership with MRM//McCann Romania and McCann Bucharest on KFC's brand new KFC Social Entertainment Channel, a new platform concept for its social media channels.