Each fall, Arby’s releases its Deep Fried Turkey Sandwiches for a few short weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. The team was tasked with driving national awareness for these limited-time menu offerings in the form of PR media impressions and social buzz in early November, which in 2020 happened to also be the week of the Presidential election–one of the noisiest news cycles of our lifetime.

It’s general knowledge that the tryptophan in turkey can make you sleepy, and studies have shown that about one third of Americans take a nice, long nap after their Thanksgiving meal.

The Arby’s team took inspiration from this cultural practice and decided to make a miracle product as the perfect companion to its delicious Deep Fried Turkey Sandwiches. Enter: The Deep Fried Turkey Pillow – a sleep mask and pillow in one, so you can get away with eating too much turkey anywhere.

The Turkey Pillow would be custom made and available for sale on ArbysDeepFriedTurkeyPillow.com while supplies lasted.

For Arby’s target audience of young suburban families, their entire lives are built around togetherness. Which makes Thanksgiving a very big deal. The extended family gathers to give thanks for all their blessings… by gorging on a feast of turkey and all its fixings.

One of the most popular pieces of pop culture lore about Thanksgiving concerns an amino acid called tryptophan. According to the New York Times, “As the common myth goes, you’re ready for bed soon after Thanksgiving dinner because the turkey you eat is loaded with tryptophan, which makes you drowsy and drags you into slumber.” This may or may not be true, but as the saying goes, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

Arby’s strategy to promote its Deep Fried Turkey Sandwich was to dive straight into this Thanksgiving mythology by admitting that you’re likely to get sleepy if you eat this sandwich.

Arby’s positioned and promoted the product in the way many “miracle products” are promoted on air and online, via infomercial-style pieces of content.

The limited run of Deep Fried Turkey Pillows was available for purchase at ArbysDeepFriedTurkeyPillow.com starting November 9, 2020. Launch content was publicized via surgical media buys (Saturday Night Live, college football, ESPN SportsCenter), social media (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook), Instagram AR filter, YouTube bumpers, influencer posts, PR, and search engine marketing (SEM), all driving to the website for more information about the pillow and the limited-time-only sandwiches.

The Deep Fried Turkey Pillow successfully drove mass amounts of media coverage and social conversation, and the pillows sold out almost immediately. In total, the program amassed more than 1 billion media impressions across more than 100 media stories and more than 1 million social video views. The pillow was covered by numerous broadcast morning shows and was even covered on Access Daily with Mario Lopez.