Jon Stewart regularly lambasted Arby’s and made us the punch line to his indigestion and diarrhea humor. We learned that other advertisers had actually threatened to pull advertising over similar stunts. So, on one hand, we were being talked about in pop-culture, but on the other hand, it was, shall we say, less than flattering for Arby’s.

This was an opportunity with two clear paths, we could fight it, or we could embrace it. We could pull our ads, or we could play along. We decided to play along.

With five years worth of content, we worked closely with Comedy Central to create a narrative centered on our “frenemy” relationship with Jon Stewart that included the best “moments” from Jon’s critique of Arby’s. We also knew for this to be successful, we needed a full partnership with Comedy Central to help tell and propagate Arby’s content in an authentic way.

Our farewell to Jon Stewart was a fully integrated program.

The plan started with a PR effort teasing the partnership in the Wall Street Journal.

We had a home-page-takeover on The Daily Show website on 8/5.

We then said good-bye via two custom spots set only to air on 8/5. The first, a 60-second montage of Stewart's best insults about Arby’s backed by the sounds of the Golden Girls' theme song, “Thank You For Being A Friend” sung by Arby’s voiceover talent, Ving Rhames. Comedy Central allowed us access to their content to create this spot. This was extremely unconventional as networks are very protective of their content. The second good-bye spot, “Arby’s Last Sandwich,” paid homage to our “frenemy” -- corned beef with mustard on marbled rye (Jon’s favorite deli sandwich).

After the spots aired we posted the content on our Facebook/Twitter/YouTube pages to drive further reach and engagement.

We won by trying not to win, creating a fully integrated media experience, simply being good sports.

Social results were staggering:

Twitter has its highest performing piece of content on the platform thus far in 2015:

• 300MM Impressions

• +42% engagement rate in 12 hours

• 6,700 retweets & 13,000 favorites

• 10,000 Twitter mentions.

On Facebook, Arby’s was the Top Trending Topic (Organically!) for 8/6/2015, resulting in 62,000 unique engagements on the Arby’s page (+3,400% increase).

Arby’s garnered:

• +1MM views on YouTube in less than 48 hours

• 51MM Impressions Earned Media

• 330 Media Placements.

The exclusive package with Comedy Central was negotiated -25% below asking price.

August 2015 was the third highest sales month of the year (+11%) and second highest without a significant increase in media spend. The w/o 8/5 sales were +15%, the highest of any week in the second half of 2015.