As a challenger brand in a crowded QSR field, Wendy’s always needs to punch above their weight. Wendy’s shook up the fast food category when they launched Breakfast in 2020, but the challenges of introducing a new daypart during covid necessitated an ongoing focus throughout 2021 to drive consumer consideration and sales growth. Summer seasonality presented additional hurdles to creating purchase frequency within the breakfast business.

One means of doing so was to connect with Wendy’s rest-of-day customers via the Wendy’s/Coke relationship. The two brands have successfully partnered on big stages and whilst one major differentiator for Wendy’s is the presence of Coke Freestyle machines in-restaurant, finding new ways to simultaneously showcase that and support sales-driven messaging has been increasingly harder to do.

Known for their sassy tone, all partnerships with Wendy’s need to ensure the brand is authentically represented and can connect with fans across shared passion points.

In 2020, Wendy’s tapped into the excitement of the return of Rick and Morty to align with the excitement of the national launch of Wendy’s Breakfast. Wendy’s branded content was loved by Rick and Morty fans, breaking all engagement benchmarks (+171%) and driving brand affinity, with 78% of viewers more interested in Wendy’s because of the partnership and 83% saying it helped differentiate Wendy’s from other fast-food brands.

The great success of the 2020 partnership proved that our brands share a passionate fanbase! Continuing the association between these synergistic brands was a no brainer.

Wendy’s needed to grab the attention of this audience via spontaneous, breakthrough content that would both get them to try breakfast, and drive appeal to soda lovers. A large activation was needed to make a splash, but with the ability to also entertain and engage audiences at national scale, particularly via their core social platforms.

Wendy’s breakfast launched in March 2020, resulting in challenges due to changing behaviors across various stages of covid. In kicking off the 2021 Breakfast campaign, only 5 out of 10 QSR consumers knew of Wendy’s breakfast.

Existing learnings showed that purchasers are work week eaters, with over 60% of Wendy’s breakfast traffic 35+, suggesting opportunity to further reach a younger QSR buyer. With a younger skew than the overarching QSR target, we saw differences with media consumption habits, specifically spending more time on screens, with cross screen viewing and high indexes against social platforms.

Results from a 2020 partnership with Adult Swim show Rick and Morty proved our two brands shared a genuine passionate fanbase, a genuinely sassy POV and great social media prowess, so building on those connections unlocked ideation around new and smart ways to leverage social platforms to bring the strategy full funnel and creatively engage them.

Leveraging our established 2020 Wendy’s X Rick and Morty synergy, we created unique, “interdimensional” Wendy’s experiences for fans online and in real life, meeting them across multiple experience and installation touchpoints where they could engage.

A fully immersive “Morty’s” drive-thru 3-day LA activation celebrated the launch of Season 5 of Rick and Morty in June 2021, capturing content via a variety of tactics including drone footage and micro-influencers leveraged to attend and create posts for Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. All content focused on engaging multiple passionate fanbases with authentic, entertaining, exclusive content.

The full activation was documented to enable deeper exposure on “Morty’s” brand hub within Fandom.com.

As the season progressed, our linear show sponsorship crossed interdimensional lines with a custom video spot featuring Wendy’s breakfast characters within Rick and Morty’s universe on-air and online! Distributed in social media too, they announced limited time delivery deals throughout the season.

In LA. unprecedented fandom demand culminated in 9 hour lines of over 2K+ cars as event content generated earned outreach with huge national impact of over half a billion combined digital impressions (over 237MM had a 99% positive tone) far beyond the local LA on and offline experience.

Social impact of the drive-thru alone led to some astounding results. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter combined delivered over 61MM impressions and over 3MM video views in just the 2-week flight! Across the multiple digital channels, Facebook alone delivered 17% view through rate, surpassing benchmark by 3x, while Twitter succeeded benchmark by over 5x with an almost 8% engagement rate.

Social made lasting effects on the Aug-Sept portion of the campaign grounded in promoting customized branded Coke flavors that were now available, overdelivering with 53MM impressions across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Overall, Wendy’s sales beat forecasts, with key success within breakfast (+120-140% growth).