Situation

In 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.

Brief

To 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.

Objectives

Launch 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.

We observed how gaming content was being created and consumed within the Elden Ring community—which was a format known as ‘challenge running’. The same has been true for all of Elden Ring’s developer’s games. Creators will ‘challenge run’ them, which involves creating a set of 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 would be incredibly difficult… 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.

As fans of the game, we were already embedded in the Reddit, Discord, Twitch and YouTube spaces that were talking about Elden Ring. We caught the Burger King chatter in real-time, allowing us to formulate a campaign that could leverage the excitement upon the game’s release.

Our audience was a fat niche —passionate about Elden Ring ‘challenge runs’, as well as casual gaming consumers. Used to brands forcing themselves into their world, they are becoming ever more wary of brands.

Our gaming influencers live streamed themselves taking the challenge on Twitch. Off their own backs, organically they uploaded edited versions of the challenge run to YouTube. We used Instagram for amplification, getting members of the gaming community involved in competitions and activations.

Our campaign needed to be as authentic as possible, we researched and launched it in places our audience hang out online.

We kicked off by releasing our Flame-Grilled Challenge Run ‘rules’ on Instagram. These were re-posted by our influencers, led by GamerSnack, Kuwaiti’s most popular influencer gamer and content creator, who agreed to take the challenge. They streamed it on Twitch, and subsequently uploaded their challenge run videos to YouTube. We also ran targeted Twitch and YouTube ads detailing our challenge ruleset for gamers looking to tackle it, and in-game competitions so that casual fans could take part.

Our campaign took place over a month, allowing influencers time to complete and then upload the challenge, where they will live forever.

Our audience were able to watch highlights of the Flame-Grilled Challenge Run on Twitch, or catch the full, edited challenge run on YouTube.

Clips of our campaign reached platforms we didn’t even target, making their way to various corners of the internet, from subreddits, to Discord servers and even Twitter pages.

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.