Situation

In the lead up to the release of 2022’s most anticipated video game Elden Ring, we saw that the community across Reddit, Discord, Twitch, YouTube and even online gaming publications was ablaze with memes and chatter about Burger King, since one of the characters in the video game’s trailers closely resembled the King himself. What a whopper of an opportunity!

Brief

To capitalise on the buzz around Burger King from the Elden Ring community, and tap into an audience which is known to typically dislike branded content, since brands rarely seem to understand their interests. Being mindful that they are very wary of brands trying to break into their space, we needed to integrate into their world seamlessly.

Objective

Launch an authentic gaming activation and surrounding campaign that partners with the gaming community in a seamless and collaborative way.

We observed how gaming content was being created and consumed within the Elden Ring community—which was a format known as ‘challenge running’. Creators will ‘challenge run’ the game, which involves creating self-imposed rules to make it as hard as possible for themselves, whilst making extremely entertaining content.

These challenge runs could involve rules such as, “beating Elden Ring using a banana as a controller”, or “beating Elden Ring without attacking anything”. We made our own, the “Flame-Grilled Challenge Run”, asking the Elden Ring community to “beat Elden Ring by only using fire spells to flame-grill everything in sight”. A feat which would be incredibly difficult… but unbelievably entertaining. A feat that put our distinctive flame grilling asset at the heart of the work and in the hearts of the gaming community. By understanding their world, we got them deeply engaging with our brand in a way no competitor brand could.

As fans of the game, we were already embedded in the right places and caught the Burger King chatter in real-time, allowing us to formulate a campaign that could leverage the excitement upon the game’s release, in a seamless and empathetic way.

Our audience was a fat niche —passionate about Elden Ring ‘challenge runs’, as well as casual gamers. Used to brands forcing themselves into their world, they are becoming ever more wary of brands. Entering their world in a traditional advertising way would be a disaster.

Our gaming influencers live streamed themselves taking the challenge on Twitch. Off their own backs, organically they uploaded edited versions of the challenge run to YouTube. We used Instagram for amplification, getting members of the gaming community involved in competitions and activations.

Our campaign needed to be as authentic as possible, we researched and launched it in places our audience hang out online.

Gamers - a community that hates marketing and brand advertising - spent over 7,200 hours immersed in our brand, watching the stream on Twitch. That’s more hours than Kuwaitis spend in the cinema in one month.

Over 15.5 million impressions - let’s put that into context, that is 3 x more impressions than the most controversial Kuwaiti Election in 2016.

Over 721,000 organic views, - which surpasses all benchmarks, especially when you consider that the most watched channel on Twitch “TheGrefg” only gets 424,000 views in a week!

With a gaming audience allergic to brands and marketing we generated 33,000 likes and 2,200 comments on YouTube. They were all talking about our brand without even realising it!