Burger King Kuwait
Client: Burger King Kuwait
Product: Burger King brand
Title: Flame-grilled challenge run
Media: Digital
Country: United Arab Emirates
Date Of Campaign: 30/08/2022
Background: SituationIn the lead-up to the release of 2022’s most anticipated video game Elden Ring, we saw that the community across Reddit, Discord, Twitch, YouTube and even online gaming publications was ablaze with memes and chatter about Burger King, since one of the characters in the video game’s trailers closely resembled the King himself. BriefTo capitalise on the buzz around Burger King from the Elden Ring community, and tap into an audience which is known to typically dislike branded content, since brands rarely seem to understand their interests.ObjectivesLaunch an authentic gaming activation and surrounding campaign that partners with the gaming community in a seamless and collaborative way. Being mindful that they are very wary of brands trying to break into their space.
Idea: We turned Burger King's iconic brand proposition, "Flame-grilling since 1954", into one of the most immersive brand experiences specifically designed for gamers. Tapping into the Elden Ring community's love of self-imposed challenges, we created the "Flame-Grilled Challenge Run". A brutally difficult challenge that had players complete the game using only fire spells to "flame-grill everything in sight" which requires a minimum of 30 hours to complete.We observed how gaming content was being created and consumed within the Elden Ring community—which was a format known as ‘challenge running’ - which involves creating self-imposed rules to make the game as hard as possible for themselves, whilst making extremely entertaining content.These challenge runs could involve rules such as, “beating Elden Ring using a banana as a controller”, or “beating Elden Ring without attacking anything”. We made our own, the “Flame-Grilled Challenge Run”, asking the Elden Ring community to “beat Elden Ring by only using fire spells to flame-grill everything in sight”. A feat which was near-mathematically impossible … but unbelievably entertaining. A feat that put our distinctive flame grilling asset at the heart of the work and in the hearts of the gaming community. By understanding their world, we got them deeply engaging with our brand in a way no competitor brand could.
Results: Gamers - a community that hates marketing and brand advertising spent over 7,200 hours immersed in our brand, watching the stream on Twitch. That’s more hours than Kuwaitis spend in the cinema in one month.Over 15.5 million impressions - let’s put that into context, that is 3 x more impressions than the most controversial Kuwaiti Election in 2016. Over 721,000 organic views, - which surpasses all benchmarks, especially when you consider that the most watched channel on Twitch “TheGrefg” only gets 424,000 views in a week! With a gaming audience allergic to brands and marketing we generated 33,000 likes and 2,200 comments on YouTube. They were all talking about our brand without even realising it!We clocked up over 7,200 watch hours on gaming live-streaming platform Twitch - that’s more time than Kuwaitis spend in the cinema in 1 month.
