The brief was simple, but challenging: Make Hank (again, a reminder, he is a CGI Buffalo) sound like the type of sports fan that you'd want to spend the day catching games with. Who knew sports, but wasn't a know-it-all, who could hang with the crew and crank good times up into great times. Our objective was to capture the attention and desire of our core sports fan target - and specifically, to get new, lapsed and single visit customers to visit us one more time per year.

In order to do this, and as Buffalo Wild Wings embarked on a brand platform launch for "Let's Go Sports Bar," we needed to ensure that our brand spokes-buffalo, Hank, had a clearly defined tone of voice - and most importantly - sense of humor. If we could do this right, we’d capture the hearts and minds of our core target

It’s one thing to build a CGI world that acts as a background while the focus is on live action elements, but it’s another to put the focus squarely on a full CGI character. But the risk was well worth the reward as we brought our 3000 pound walking, talking, and potentially flying buffalo to life and put him front and center. The challenges we faced were creating something that doesn’t exist and making it feel like it does. And also bringing it into very real locations and interacting with very real people and very real food. As well as giving a normally emotionless creature a full range of emotions without breaking the Buffalo-ness (something the live action Lion King failed to achieve). It’s always a challenge to make something new, but with our partners at The Agency we knew we had the right people to do so.

To say the campaign was a success is an understatement. Unaided Ad Awareness (top of mind) grew 6% from 36% to 38% Pre-Post Hank. Aided Ad Awareness which also grew 19% from 59% to 70% Pre-Post Hank. Our TV Aided Ad Awareness grew 24% from 42% to 52% Pre-Post Hank, and our Social Aided Ad Awareness grew 10% from 21% to 23% Pre-Post Hank. Most importantly, we continued to defend our turf as THE sports bar in America, and put our competitors in their place (second place, that is).