Burger King has eliminated 8500 tons of artificial ingredients, demonstrating their commitment to making real food for real people. So, we were tasked to communicate this to the U.S market.

Meanwhile, in 2020, McDonald’s launched celebrity meals in the U.S., a limited edition of their signature orders with their names on it: The Travis Scott Meal, The J. Balvin Meal, The Saweetie Meal, The BTS Meal, getting the whole world talking.

With these two things in mind, we decided to give a spin to our competitor’s strategy by using influencer artists, in the only way we could to communicate our main benefit: being free from artificial ingredients.

In 2020, McDonald's launched celebrity meals, a limited edition of their signature orders with their names on it: the Travis Scott Meal, the J. Balvin Meal, the Saweetie Meal and the BTS Meal.

So, to promote its menu made without any artificial ingredients, Burger King decided to do the same. However, instead of using the fake aliases of celebrities, we used their real names instead.

We partnered with three celebrities: Nelly, Anitta and Lil Huddy to create the Cornell Haynes Jr. meal, the Larissa Machado meal and the Chase Hudson meal. Real meals made with real names and real food.

In 2020, Burger King eliminated 8500 tons of artificial ingredients from its menu. To attract and retain customers in the US market, the brand had to find a relevant and talkable way to communicate this competitive advantage.

Instead of launching a standalone campaign, Burger King decided to hack the conversation that McDonald’s celebrity meals were creating nationwide. To do so, we launched the Keep it Real Meals, named after the real birthnames of celebrities relevant to its core target. The Cornell Haynes Jr., Larissa Machado and Chase Hudson Meal – free from artificial foods and artificial names.

Rather than casting celebrities and leveraging their names to sell food, Burger King decided to give a twist to celebrity meals and collaboration by partnering with 3 celebrities relevant to its target: Nelly, Anitta and Lil Huddy.

Instead of using their celebrity aliases, we used their real birthnames to promote a series of meals that were free from artificial ingredients: the Cornell Haynes Jr, Larissa Machado and Chase Hudson meal.

The Keep it Real Meals were available at every Burger King in the U.S. and promoted on social media, TV and events like the VMAs.

Our campaign to communicate the realness of our menus using the real names of celebrities made the news nationwide and worldwide, generating over 1.2 billion impressions.

It had a great impact on social media, with over 7 million mentions and more than 70 million people reached.

The Keep It Real Meals were picked up by all major news outlets in the US and worldwide and even made it to the VMAs where Anitta performed under her real birthname.