Case Study: Keeping Fortnite Fresh
When Wendy’s agency pitched them a potentially headline-grabbing, award-winning digital campaign that would cost nothing to execute and could be completed in a week, they must have thought it was too good to be true. But that’s precisely what VMLY&R were proposing to the fast-food restaurant chain.
The project capitalised on the creative team’s passion for in-game advertising, to hijack a mobile gaming event and bring Wendy’s core message to an audience of gamer
The brief
Kansas City-based VMLY&R had been Wendy’s agency of record for around six years, during which time they had pioneered their digital strategy of trends in social media – in particular, Twitter – as a single voice, rather than corporate messaging. It had been so successful that Matt Keck, VMLY&R’s Associate Director of Conversation Design, claims, “social media has led the Wendy’s brand transformation in recent years.”
Against this backdrop, VMLY&R Senior Analyst, Jeremy Cline explains the Wendy’s were: “Always looking for opportunities to stand out in the fast-food vertical’s ‘sea of sameness’.” This resulted in a standing brief to find “new, innovative, unique ways to tell the Wendy’s brand story to a new generation.” One way they were hoping to do this was to tap into the growing, influential market in gaming channels, IGA in particular.
The idea
During Thanksgiving week of 2018, they noticed that Fortnite, one of the biggest games among US teens, was hosting a special ‘Food Fight’ event. Launched in 2017, Fortnite has become a worldwide phenomenon thanks to its multiplayer mode, and infamous dance moves of its characters; if you’ve ever seen someone do ‘The Floss’, it’s thanks to Fortnite.
For the ‘Food Fight’ event, players chose to be on ‘Team burger’ or ‘Team pizza’. Already competitors Burger King had announced their intention to play for Team burger. But the Wendy’s team noticed something: the burgers in the game came from a freezer. With Wendy’s core product proposition being that their burgers were ‘fresh, never frozen’, they realised how they could participate – by destroying freezers.
Once the realisation had been made, it was a speedy process to pull together a pitch deck and get this unique in-game advertising idea in-front on Wendy’s CMO. Within three days of its gestation the idea was approved, preparations were made, and all of America left for the Thanksgiving break.
Production
The team chose to play in the Red Riding Hood ‘skin’, who looks conveniently like their existing logo. McKay Hathaway, VML Creative Director, points to the teams existing knowledge coming in useful, “That was one of those things where our gaming knowledge could contribute to the idea, and make sure the whole execution was as on-brand as it could be.“
The integrated digital campaign and the cross-promotion on other social channels led a new audience to find the Wendy’s Twitch channel. Furthermore, the plan was to use Twitch’s supportive culture to engage individuals and play collaboratively with them. As such, no paid influencer strategy was required.
But they wouldn’t know if they had been successful until the game began on Monday 26 November at 2pm.
The VMLY&R team played all day, handing the controller around the office, which was populated by staff delighted to be playing video games at work.
The IGA idea caught on immediately. “Fortnite is a social game, so we ended up playing with a lot of fans, they would join the game.” Explains Cline. As word spread, “it turned into a moment where everyone wanted to play with Wendy’s. We had influencers organically reaching out to Wendy’s saying they wanted to play.”
Meanwhile, a team of moderators worked on deleting banned words from the chat stream and responding to social media messages.
The response
By 5pm the Twitch stream was showing to 5,000 concurrent viewers. Other Twitch users were commenting, linking, and reposting clips of the activity to their own streams. A total of over 1.5million minutes of the stream were watched. We did this activation to launch our overall in-game advertising strategy.” Explain Cline, noting: “We needed to prove ourselves to this audience. That’s been our digital strategy on other platforms as well. On Twitter, we positioned more of an influencer than a brand, and on Twitch, we could position ourselves more as a gamer than a brand channel.”
Thein-game advertising stunt certainly caused attention, according to Cline, because the team had followed their instincts in using the channel in a new way: “The goal of the game is to kill other players, but we were killing freezers. We played the game wrong for nine hours. We went in a direction no one else had thought to go in yet, and that always feels really cool.”
“You don’t see major corporations shifting their budgets towards esports.’ Laments Keck, adding: “You’ll see that focus shift a lot when younger people get into those positions of power.”
And the team believe computer and video games and streams to already be a core media channel for brands, or as McKay puts it, “Gaming is real everybody.”