Every Halloween, Burger King looks for different ways to engage with its customers. In 2021 we decided to reward the bravest ones: those who dare to stay awake at the scariest time of night, during the scariest week of the year.

3 A.M. in known as the Witching Hour and the 3 A.M. Challenge is a social trend where people hunt for apparitions at this time associated with supernatural events, like witches, demons and ghosts.

So last Halloween, Burger King decided to feed this trend, literally. During Halloween week, Apparitions haunted our App in the form of free meals. People had to be awake during the scariest week of the year, during the scariest hour of the day, in order to find not-so-scary free meals.

The campaign was launched with an online film with furniture moving by itself, doors slamming of their own accord, and other stuff that goes bump in the night!

To spread the word, we also worked with influencers in different countries where the idea was rolled out and we had an OOH campaign inviting people to download the app, wake up at 3 A.M. and win some tasty treats.

The Burger King tech team worked for months to pull this off. We had to ensure that the free meals would appear exactly at 3 A.M. and that the app would be able to handle the unpredictable amount of people that would appear in search of the apparitions. The idea was rolled out in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, China, Spain and other global markets.

17.3% increase in app downloads.

150,000 codes given out over the week.

Codes ran out daily on an average of 11 seconds.

Half a million people globally using our app at 3 A.M.