Mobile payment services like Venmo have become the most efficient and fun way to instantly transfer money between two parties. According to Statista, Venmo is averaging 60% year-on-year growth with total user base over 40 million. What makes these mobile transaction platforms so entertaining and optimal for a marketing opportunity is that each user can leave notes in the form of words, .GIFs, and emojis that are public facing for all to see in the payment feed. Venmo accounts have even become so popular, people feature their Venmo handles in their social bios in hopes that people will randomly send them money.

After noticing how people on social were sharing and promoting their Venmo handles, we decided to turn the conversations within Venmo transactions into a digitally unexpected way to get users already talking about money to start talking about Burger King’s $1 Value Menu. We did so by simply Venmo-ing $1 to over 250K users from the Burger King Venmo account, knowing they would immediately go to social to see the conversation around this, and to even share their own screenshots of the random and hilarious transaction.

Venmo along with its competitors have created streamlined transactional platforms that people use to send money directly to a single individual. These platforms are growing exponentially year-after-year with Gen-Z and Millennials leading the way. With this data, and after performing social listening techniques, we noticed our Gen-Z and Millennial audience started sharing their Venmo handles in their social bios and in their posts in hopes that their friends and random people would send them money. This consumer behavior sparked our interest as a strategic way in to get our target to start talking about Burger King’s $1 Value Menu. So to get them sharing and talking about Burger King’s $1 Value Menu, we decided to Venmo 250K users $1 whose handles we sourced from social, through Venmo, and through our email lists.

To execute this, we sourced random Venmo handles across social and Burger King App users’ emails, which even inspired Venmo to share a randomized list of users with us once they saw what we were doing. After generating a large amount of social chatter and buzz over the course of seven days of sending $1 Venmo payments, we let all the confused but highly entertained people know that this stunt was to announce our new $1 Your Way Value Menu, which they could now go and try on our dime.

• +38% lift in sales

• 508M total earned impressions

• $3.1M in earned media revenue