About the Client
Aviasales is the largest flight search platform in Russia. The team also creates special advertising projects for brands and runs bold, creative media campaigns.
The Challenge
Write a fun, interactive quest called The Search for Spices for Rostic’s. The goal was to highlight the ingredients in the new menu and spark the audience’s interest.
Rostic’s (formerly KFC Russia) was launching a limited-time menu inspired by Georgian cuisine. To promote it, they teamed up with Aviasales on a special project — an interactive quiz where readers travel to Georgia in search of ingredients for a chicken marinade. I wrote the storyline, questions, and answers for the project.
This was my first special project for Aviasales. The client already had the basic premise: the main character’s dad sends them on a mission to find spices for his signature chicken marinade. The goal is to track down the ingredients, bring them home, and prepare a feast. My job was to figure out what adventures would happen along the way.
How I Came Up with the Special Project
The quiz was built around the ingredients from the new menu: garlic, pepper, adjika, and cumin. We also threw some mineral water into the mix. Using these ingredients, I came up with situations where readers had to make a choice, guess an answer, or remember something.
The biggest challenge was coming up with interesting questions. Sometimes I used a surprising fact, other times a joke or an encounter with a character. For example, in one episode, the main character visits a plantation to find black pepper. They're asked to choose between berries of different colors. The answer seems obvious: if you need black pepper, pick the black ones. But it's a trick question. To get it right, you need to know that black pepper is actually made from green berries.
Added jokes to make the quiz worth replaying. There was plenty of room to have fun with it. In one question, I made both answers correct. Pick one, and you get a checkmark. Play again, choose the other, and you're still right.
In another episode, the main character's dad's friend asks them to guess which hand he's hiding the adjika in. No amount of knowledge will help here — it's pure luck. If you guess correctly, you get a message saying, "Well, at least it's not zucchini spread." On your first playthrough, that makes absolutely no sense. But if you play again and pick the other hand, that's exactly what you'll find. I wanted readers to discover something new every time they played through the quiz.
Reworked the jokes based on client feedback. Not every joke made it into the final version. In the episode about cumin, a grandma shouted, "Catch that goat!" One of the answer options was a playful twist on a Russian saying: "I'm not me, and the goat isn't mine!" (This is a playful twist on the Russian saying “I'm not me, and the horse isn't mine” — roughly equivalent to “Not my circus, not my monkeys.”). If you picked that option, the goat would eat the cumin, and a message would pop up: "What a goat!" (In Russian, “goat” is also a mild insult used to describe someone who treats other people badly.)
I thought it was funny because the whole scene was literally about a goat. But the client saw it differently: readers might think the insult was aimed at them. They asked me to replace the goat with a baby goat and tone down the wording. Still, the scene turned out pretty funny.
