Christmas is the busiest time of year for advertising, with the UK’s biggest brands locked in a battle to ‘out Christmas’ each other with big budget TVC’s. With most big brands investing heavily in TV, there was a clear space to go after a Christmas behaviour that no other brands were targeting: the drive home. Burger King was struggling with low drive-thru sales all year, and expecting sales to fall further over the festive period. So, narrowing the focus to the drive home presented the opportunity to capitalise on the clear space while also addressing the business problem of drive-thru sales.

The idea was to hijack a classic Christmas song, one that people would readily listen to on their drive home for Christmas, and rewrite it to navigate drivers from their location on the busiest motorways right to a Burger King drive thru.

Christmas is the busiest time of year for advertising in the UK. It’s typically dominated by the biggest brands battling to ‘out-Christmas’ each other with big budget TVC’s. This year being Burger King’s first foray into Christmas, the big challenge was finding a way to cut through all the noise. To do this, we found a Christmas behaviour that no other brand was owning: the drive home. It aligned with the business problem of poor drive-thru sales over the festive period, so naturally the decision was made to double down on the drive home for Christmas. So, while the competition were focussed on big budget TVC’s, Burger King hijacked a classic Christmas song and put it on the radio for everyone driving home for Christmas.

This campaign took the UK's biggest festive song, Driving Home for Christmas, and turned it into Driving (thru the) Home (of the Whopper) for Christmas. In an 8 minute music video and 23 geo-targeted radio commercials, our rewrite featured genuine turn-by-turn directions, guiding drivers to Burger King drive-thrus. So 23 stores along the UK's busiest roads had their own unique lyrics. To add to the ridiculousness, Driving (thru the) Home (of the Whopper) for Christmas was performed by an actual GPS navigation voice.

After a difficult year for drive-thru sales, a post campaign sales report showed a 4% increase in drive-thru sales in all of the 23 stores mentioned in the campaign, compared to the stores not mentioned.

What’s more, people actually enjoyed the ads, with 78% of people watching through to the end on YouTube, and a listen through rate of 97.7% on radio. The ads also reached 22m people through linear radio and had 4.4m listens on digital audio.