In the United States, where our campaign took place, Black Friday is the biggest shopping occasion of the year. Brands spend around 6$ Billion dollars on attracting customers and typically, fashion and tech retailers dominate the conversation. Our brief was to make BURGER KING relevant on Black Friday and drive Black Friday shoppers in-store when millions of people are switching to online-purchasing. Our secondary objective, was to build on love and awareness of our most iconic product, the delicious flame-grilled WHOPPER.

Black-Friday’s about finding deals. And what better deal could BURGER KING offer than the WHOPPER, for free! Even better? Using the online ad-budgets of 1400 other brands to pay for them. We found a new way to hack the granddaddy of online media: banners. And we used them to make brands pay for WHOPPERS. Shoppers just had to do their regular Black Friday shopping through our mobile website.

How do you make a Burger retailer relevant on Black Friday? Yes, it’s one of the biggest retail occasions of the year. But the stars of the show are usually tech and fashion brands. Not restaurants, and certainly not Burger brands! Even worse, most of the shopping that occurs happens online. So we designed WHOPPER-SHOPPER.com as a shopping website that rewarded shopping with WHOPPER vouchers. The twist, we got 1400 other brands to pay for those WHOPPERS through affiliate marketing. We targeted our audience of Black Friday Shoppers and Whopper-Lovers with posts on social media and led them to our website during the busiest shopping event of the year – Black Friday (15.11.18-26.11.18), when buzz was highest. After the promotion ended, they received WHOPPER vouchers, courtesy of some of their favourite brands. These vouchers in turn drove them in store.

WHOPPER-SHOPPER.com was a BURGER KING branded shopping website with a clever twist. It was filled with banners representing over 1400 of the biggest brands. Whenever someone clicked a banner to do their Black Friday shopping through the WHOPPER-SHOPPER.COM website, brands paid us money from their online media budgets through the affiliate marketing process. We then refunded that money back to Black Friday Shoppers as WHOPPER vouchers. To participate, all they had to do was create an account and do their usual Black Friday shopping.

We built brand-love for BURGER KING as the brand that helped people to get the best Black Friday Deal ever: free WHOPPERS. News channels (Financial Times, Fox News, ABC News, Teen Vogue, Thrillist, Elite Daily etc.) were quick to pick up the idea. Helping us raise brand buzz around the brand an incredible 29% during the Black Friday period. And we reached nearly 300 Million people, despite spending nothing on media. In addition, as all the ‘generous’ brands paid full price for WHOPPERS, our campaign actually ended up making a profit on every WHOPPER we gave away.