We created a very relevant activation for an advertising hating generation to increase brand awareness and affinity to the brand through the use of what Gen Z love the most: smartphones and their cameras. That's why to promote Burger King's Secret Menu, we chose to make a speakeasy approach to get their attention and turned every Burger King logo into an entertaining and interactive experience to discover hidden items on the menu. This activation created a genuine connection among these new consumers by moving beyond the traditional advertising channels.

Burger King is known in Puerto Rico for jingles, always having one near you and the Whopper®. All of these things are great, but they are not necessarily relevant to younger generations like Gen Z. A new platform that offers new and exciting products was needed to entice them. Secret Menus have been used successfully in other markets for this very purpose. They grew so much in popularity that they stopped being secret, becoming just another marketing tool. Another big trend in the past years has been the use of Augmented Reality in camera phones, which has given the ability to everyone to easily scan objects, words, signage among other things in order to generate an action on your phone.

We turned every BK logo into a secret portal to access a hidden menu full of crazy and delicious food combinations. To find these items on the secret menu, people simply had to scan any BK logo to unlock them. And since we hacked Google's AR mobile feature, no app installation was needed in your smartphone, just your camera. Instead of inviting people to use it, we chose TikTok as our main channel to seed videos of regular people discovering a never before seen menu on Burger King with their smartphones. At first people thought it was one of the many social media hoaxes, but when more videos started to show consumers discovering unusual combinations on the BK menu, that's where things really picked up. Hundreds of BK fans started to upload videos of them scanning the BK logo at different places and randomly, new decadent items would appear.

It is no secret that Gen Z hates advertising. They do everything to avoid it, skip it or even block it from their daily content. These young consumers are very hard to market to because they have a shorter attention span and a high propensity to dislike anything that gets in their way like a traditional ad. Gen Z is likely to be more receptive to snackable content, funny stories and social media challenges. So when Burger King was going to promote their secret menu, the traditional way was not an option. We needed to create something that captured their attention, turned on their Fear of Missing Out radar and didn't smell like an ad.

We hacked Google’s AR technology and added it to our secret website: menusecretobk.com. Once in the site, fans could use their cameras to scan the Burger King logo anywhere. Once they did that, it activated a randomizer and a hidden item from the Secret Menu would pop up in your screen with a secret code for you to order the crazy and delicious combinations at any of the 172 restaurants in Puerto Rico.

In just 2 months:

* 2,033,105 organic impressions on social media (41% higher than the 1.2M objective)

* 536,000 website visits (33% more than the 300k objective)

* First brand in Puerto Rico to go viral on Tik Tok