• Subcultures: A group of individuals who come together over the same passions and interests

• K-pop fans: Korean pop-music fans

• Sneakerheads: Individuals obsessed with sneakers and footwear of all kinds

• Stoners: Individuals who regularly enjoy marijuana

• Meme enthusiasts: Individuals who love sharing images with comedic copy on social media

• Prom: A dance or ball that happens in spring for high school students in the U.S.

• Promposal: Asking someone to be your date to prom with a big, over-the-top gesture

• The Today Show: A popular American morning talk show

• IHOP: International House of Pancakes

• IHOB: International House of Burgers or what IHOP changed its name to promote burgers on its menu

• Brockhampton: An American alternative, hip-hop band

Shift BK’s social presence from talking at consumers to speaking with them, engaging with subcultures and reacting to trending topics. For instance, noticing chatter among our teen group about “Promposals,” we asked Wendy’s to prom on Twitter. When gamers begged for the return of Sneak King, we brought it to E3. When President Trump mentioned feeding the Football National Champions fast food, we responded swiftly. When stoners wanted to celebrate 4/20, we dropped Adult Swim–style content to launch a new snack. When IHOP changed its name to IHOB, we responded by changing Burger King’s name to Pancake King. When Nicki Minaj dropped a surprise album, we celebrated along with her fans. When we noticed fans celebrating up-and-coming band Brockhampton, we updated BK’s social pages to mirror themes from their album, using our feed to help them debut the following week at number one. And much, much more.

To approach the task, the agency reconsidered how BK should engage its social community. Given the fragmented state of our target’s attention, we recognized the need to create content that contributes to the other content on each of our target’s feeds. We started with a theory: validating niche interests online would be met with love and excitement from our community. Instead of industry-standard social media targeting that comes with a hefty budget, we set out to organically engage with digital subcultures (online tribes connected through topics they are passionate about) to transcend from brand to fan, or even to peer.

The team developed a new, reflexive model for monitoring the social media activities of the subcultures that make up the Burger King target audience—K-pop fans, sneakerheads, stoners, meme enthusiasts, etc.—to discover each group’s lexicon, behavior, confirmation biases, and trending conversations. As conversations were identified as a natural fit for BK, social content was deployed in the voice of those subcultures, timed to rising trends, in effect, rhetorical identification at scale. Our approach returned quick results, giving us confidence to define a new content-creation formula that relied on both reactive and proactive management of subculture-driven insight and real-time optimization.

With a zero-dollar increase in media spend, we drove consideration among our target from 74% to 79% and grew brand preference from 8% to a whopping 20%, overtaking all other age groups. We found that Burger King consumers were 407% more likely to engage with content deployed in this fashion. Online, we grew conversations about Burger King by 40%, increased organic impressions by 183%, and gained 650,000+ followers across all channels. Our BK social content received national press on 30+ unique occasions across media outlets as diverse as Mashable, The Daily Mail, CNN, Elite Daily, Thrillist, Time, and Forbes, among others. This represented 8.7+ billion (yes, billion) earned media impressions and $89MM+ in earned advertising value. The associated creative resulted in 40+ industry awards (Cannes Lion, Clios, DigiDay, Andys, Hatch, etc.). Best of all, the online communities made up of 18-24-year-olds are now actively asking us to join their conversations.