Wingstop is a fast casual restaurant known for its “buffalo wings”, handheld chicken wings deep-fried and coated in tangy, spicy sauce. Nearly everyone in America has a soft spot in their hearts and stomachs for wings.

A big day for Wingstop’s sales and for many of our core fans is what is known as 4/20, a celebration of marijuana and cannabis culture on April 20th of every year. With marijuana legal for medical and/or recreational use now in 30 states, April 20th has grown from a small hippie happening into a nationwide holiday. As this holiday grows, so does marijuana usage and the munchies (intense food cravings, a side effect) -- and Wingstop is the perfect solution.

Our 4/20 goal was to increase sales and engage fans.

Using social listening, we tapped into the truth of how our core fans celebrate 4/20 – with long hours of binge watching. With binge watching two things are inevitable – seeing the same ads over and over – and needing great snacks. We also found that weed and Wingstop were mentioned 23,000 times together in social media in the last year.

This inspired us to create the first ever 4/20 High-Atus, encouraging 4/20 friendly binge watchers to take five and cure their flavor crave at Wingstop. This idea turned into a series of :15 repetitive videos that became trippier and trippier, turning up the crave.

Taking cues from old cinema snack bars, and the infamously repetitive commercials on services like Hulu and YouTube, we created our own repetitive videos, serving four sequential messages to binge watching, 4/20 friendlies across media channels that we identified using behavioral and contextual targeting and re-marketing. It started off pretty tame, but as our audience got more messed up, so did our videos, leaving viewers questioning reality and craving Wingstop.

On Hulu, we ran four, :15 second units across a program, creating breaks for bingers. We extended the 4/20 High-Atus across Online Video using re-targeting.

This wasn’t a one hitter. Using Cable TV, we scheduled sequential videos with 2 units per pod, 4 units per show on Adult Swim and Viceland as well as sequential videos on Fuse.

We hit the Big Screen on 4/20 -- placing a High-Atus in Cinema prior to the Super Troopers 2 premiere – a cult comedy with a drug caper at the core.

And we didn’t bogart the message. Paid Social and Wingstop’s owned sites caught the buzz too, changing content at strategic points like 4:20 pm and encouraging fans to share the content and order wings online. We ran cut downs of our :15 spots in Paid Social, serving them in increments to users.

Wingstop’s 4/20 effort was dope. Return on Ad Spend was 54% higher than year ago, sales were 9% higher, transactions increased 46%, and online order revenue doubled, making this the most successful 4/20 in Wingstop history.

Social response was high, with 50K conversations on Twitter alone and 300K Organic impressions. Overall, 18% of viewers who saw the first video saw all four, and with completion rates increasing from video to video, we drove Grade A engagement and Adweek named Wingstop the best 4/20 brand integration. By becoming part of the 4/20 experience, we effectively leveraged a business opportunity for Wingstop. With results like this we’re gonna keep on tokin’.