Carl’s Jr. took on four elements of culture and mocked them to a point where no one knew if we were joking or being serious. We used our digital voice and behaviors to light-heartedly engage with trends across culture and youth demographics; like selfies, Amazon taking over the world, movie tie-ins and artificial intelligence. Basically, we were trolls. Not like, grumbling angry trolls hiding under a bridge trying to take your money. Carl’s Jr. was a shining happy star putting your face on breakfast toast. But still trying to take your money.

How does a fast food brand become irrelevantly relevant to the internets? By trolling in every way they can.

#AmazonBuyUs seemed like a haphazard Tweet storm, but in reality it was a well choreographed stunt—releasing 1 billion dollar idea every hour for 24 hours to convince CEO Jeff Bezos to a 30 minute presentation in order to buy us. 10,000 people watched an empty conference room live on Periscope.

Nothing tastes as good as vanity, so we laser cut youth culture directly onto Carl’s Jr.’s sandwiches. Thousands on social media we given a filter experience like no other—toast. We called it #SourdoughSelfies.

Jumping on the AI bandwagon, the “intelligent” machine, #AskRandomizer, answered people’s random questions—from marriage support, to investment advice, to tips on hot sauce, trolling the most popular fast food brand of youth: Taco Bell.

For “Ready Player One”, we honored director Steven Spielberg, by renaming our sliders, “SpielBurgers”. Our antics enticed him to issue a cease and desist, while simultaneously endorsing how good our burgers taste. This elaborate trolling effort of a celebrity included ambushing the red carpet, his parking spot and the most elaborate and beautiful set designs for the silliest play on words ever.

As a challenger fast food brand (ranking around 15th in their category) our strategy proved to keep Carl’s Jr. relevant in popular culture by earning massive returns in earned media. Through these four tentpole activations our collective social media strategy garnered nearly 3 billion earned media impressions in less than six months. A huge win, based on the minimal investment.

#AmazonBuyUs: Over 1 Billion media impressions, with a cost of just $6.92 per MM impressions

Randomizer: In a single 10 hour day we made 100 custom video responses with over 550 uses of our hashtag and 28 million brand impressions.

#SourdoughSelfies: $11.5k for 1.3M impressions

SpielBurgers: 1.6 Billion media impressions

- We had over 264 million potential digital impressions for the week which is a 312% increase over the average number of impressions.

- We saw a jump in posts and mentions as well, at 14K mentions and 11K posts.