Many Aussies enjoy a cheeky holiday to one of our many tropical island neighbours. But due to COVID, they can’t, and many tropical tour guides are now out of work. Aussies pride themselves on helping the underdog - so when Uber Eats wanted to promote Hungry Jack’s (Burger King in Australia) Tropical Whopper burger, we saw an opportunity to help. An ambitious sales target was set for the social-led campaign, alongside a loftier objective to impact culture.

Unable to give tours of their tropical paradises (due to COVID travel bans), we recruited and paid island tour guides to give tours of the Tropical Whopper burger instead.

There’s nothing more Australian than slapping a slice of tropical pineapple on a burger, and part of the strategic challenge was to communicate the addition of this ingredient. But to resonate with Aussies on a deeper level, our strategy took into account the broader regional context surrounding the decline in tropical tourism, social sentiment around Aussies missing out on their tropical holidays, and the great Aussie tradition of helping out the underdog. This helped us find a perfect fit in using tropical tour guides to guide us through the burger’s tropical ingredients, and also informed the target audience for the ‘Tropical Whopper Tours’ campaign - a mix of fast food lovers, and Aussies missing out on their annual tropical holiday.

We found, briefed and remotely filmed a number of tour guides across the tropics, from the Cook Islands to Bali, giving guided verbal tours of the Tropical Whopper. These formed a suite of short social videos purpose-made for Instagram and Snapchat - in 6”, 15” and 30”+ formats, carefully targeted to millions of hungry and holiday-starved Aussies. The campaign ran for one week, from the 12th to the 19th of January 2021. The social assets were further promoted with PR, and supported with OOH and Uber Eats’ owned media assets, like email bursts and in-app media.

Millions of Aussies were wooed by our tour guides’ talent and charisma, with our sales target exceeded by 120% in just one week. The effort made national news headlines across the tropics, described as a ‘Whopper of an opportunity’ for their local tour guides. It reached over 2.4 million Aussies, got over 15 million impressions, saw WoW growth rate of 176%, and lifted Hungry Jack’s overall sales on Uber Eats by 10% for the week of the campaign. But most importantly, it helped some of the tour guides most affected by the global travel lockdown.