Buffalo wings are an American favorite year round, but they enjoy incredible popularity during Super Bowl season, being consumed by the billions (yes, billions!). And given that Frank’s RedHot is the original buffalo wing hot sauce, used in their invention at the Buffalo, NY’s Anchor Bar in 1964, we were tasked with finding a new and exciting way to assert ourselves as the official buffalo wing sauce of the season and get our consumers to eat more wings, with their best accompaniment, Frank’s. Knowing our customers spend big during the Super Bowl, and with the crypto craze that’s been fueling sports betting, we needed to lean into the crypto space with something to excite, engage, and get them to eat more wings (and Frank’s).

In addition to increasing Frank’s RedHot sales, buzz and affinity for the brand, we were asked to deliver 500+ million impressions with a $600,000 budget.

Millions of people eat billions of buffalo wings every year. No, seriously, billions.

So, how does the hot sauce brand who invented buffalo wings in the first place, Frank’s RedHot, get even more people to get even more buffalo wings? Well, today’s cryptocurrency-crazed world gave us a crazy idea.

And that idea, was called Bonecoin.

A totally fake cryptocurrency we totally made up, that turned every single wing you ate into something you could earn.

All you had to do was eat wings, then scan the leftover bones through AI image recognition technology on your mobile device which automatically detected how many wings you ate, then converted them into Bonecoin. And what could you buy with the first-ever buffalo wing cryptocurrency you earned by eating?

The first-ever edible NFT, made out of buffalo wings, that you could also eat.

Super Bowl is the all-American hot sauce and wing event; and Frank’s RedHot was looking to play its usual starring role. With Americans eating billions, yes billions, of wings every Super Bowl, we were tasked with getting our consumers to eat even more chicken wings leading up to the big game and assert ourselves as the sauce of the football season in an unexpected way. Knowing that crypto was fueling the sports betting craze and our customers tend to spend big during the Super Bowl, we figured why not get in on it and get more wings eaten in the process?

We designed and coded a mobile site (bonecoin.com) leveraging AI recognition technology which allowed a user to open their mobile camera and easily live-scan or upload photos of their eaten buffalo wing bones, which then were automatically converted into Bonecoin. Whoever earned the most could buy our buffalo wing NFT on Opensea, which came with the first-ever edible NFT — a life-sized replica made of buffalo wings that they could also literally eat.

We used OLV and social (Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat and Reddit) to communicate with our audience given the digital nature of the program. We took advantage of our brand partnership with Eli Manning, who tweeted about the campaign and announced our food truck activation where he served local New Yorkers 3,000 wings in under two hours. In addition to Manning, we also partnered with Eric Andre and cooking influencers to launch the technology.

Frank’s RedHot had its most successful Q1 ever after the Super Bowl campaign, seeing 19+ million units sold and a 17.3% increase in sales. We made a splash with 775 million impressions, surpassing our 500MM KPI, and 500k+ engagements. The winner of our digital NFT and edible NFT replica actually ate and scanned 888 buffalo wings to earn it, collecting the most Bonecoins in the process.

We saw national coverage ranging from broadcast pickup on shows like CNBC’s Mad Money, Fox Business and the TODAY Show as well as online outlets such as Ad Age, Adweek, CNN, Forbes, Fox Business, CryptoNews, BroBible, DraftKings, New York Post, Page Six, and Yahoo.

We successfully hit our brief objective to increase chicken wing consumption with 66k chicken wing bones scanned by 66k different app users. Frank’s RedHot also saw 826 new registered users signing up for emails from the company.