The eternal rivalry between Burger King and McDonald's reached its most unsustainable level as more and more online coupons offering increasingly larger discounts were being given out. How long will we let this price war involving kings and clowns kill our margins? How could we hack into an unsustainable coupon model and start distributing coupons in a smarter fashion, find a way out of this dead end and bring in more customers? Based on these questions, we set about looking for an answer.

We created an exclusive business model and put Burger King discount coupons in Free Fire. Gamers who used these coupons to buy a BK combo received a code they could exchange for diamond tickets, which are worth real money in-game. That means people who bought a Whopper would have diamonds to spend and play better. We combined something gamers obsess about and the hunger that strikes in the middle of a gaming session. To sum up, it was a success. And to top it off, we were the official sponsors of Free Fire Pro League Brazil Season 3 and hosted the grand finals in what was the most watched livestream on YouTube Brazil in 2019.

The main focus of all of Burger King's communication is young people. But where to find this audience in large quantities? The answer: Free Fire. The world's most downloaded mobile game in 2019 and a phenomenon among young people in Brazil is one of the most profitable apps in the country, ahead of Netflix and Tinder.

And if there are two things gamers love is fast food discounts and Free Fire diamonds, a virtual currency worth real money used to buy in-game items, like outfits and special weapons to give them an edge during matches.

By blending these two strong desires (to eat at BK and to get diamonds) together we created the Diamond Whopper, an exclusive collab with Free Fire where we made our coupons available without paying for any media. If the coupons translated into BK sales, we would buy gamers diamonds. Thus, Free Fire would also profit.

Diamond Whopper coupons were distributed exclusively in Free Fire so players could take a screenshot, head over to a BK to buy a Whopper and redeem their long sought-after reward: DIAMONDS. We did a collab with the game and the deal was: players who bought at BK using a coupon from the game would get diamonds to spend in Free Fire. All stood to profit from this deal, risk-free.

Activation took place over a period of four months, between October 25, 2019, through February 25, 2020, for all Free Fire players, who made a point of putting the word out that THEY COULD GET DIAMONDS BY EATING AT BURGER KING, creating several videos documenting every step of the fun saga of heading on over to a BK restaurant to win in-game rewards.

Everything that was sold at BK via coupons came with an exclusive Free Fire code. This made it possible for us to track the results of this action IN ISOLATION.

We sold 362,631 Whopper combos.

This means that our hacking into the coupon model generated directly more than US$ 1.4 million in risk-free revenue for BK. WE HAD A 30.51% YoY increase in Whopper sales.

POSITIVE SIDE EFFECTS = Brand exposure and increased sales, all from risk-free investment.

Burger King took part in the livestreams of Free Fire’s Brazil and World Series finals, which became the FIRST AND SECOND MOST WATCHED in the history of YouTube Brazil, in 2019. We also generated over 3 million views on YouTube through content created by Free Fire community members themselves where they talked about the Diamond Whopper.