The idea came from the analysis of an up and coming trend in Italy: The Umarells. "Umarells" is a slang word used to describe elderly retirees who love to spend their free time – which is a lot – watching construction sites, dispensing advice that no one listens to.

Through a very targeted recruiting process we chose 5 of them: the Kings of Umarells. By making them supervisors for a day in the first of many new Burger King's construction sites, the had become the protagonists of a 360 degree campaign that in a short amount of time created buzz among the public, raising awareness around the new openings even before those had taken place.

We started off based on a growing, heartfelt sentiment in order to craft a multimedia campaign able to grab the attention of a younger audience by getting in touch with their emotions through an unexpected approach.

The recruiting of the protagonists (the friendly Umarells) in itself, enabled us to play with the topic, monitoring elderly men's “social networks”: crosswords magazines, church notice boards and so on.

The five selected Umarells became the main characters of a video which, starting from social networks, attracted the attention and the warmth of a vast audience ending up on different channels.

In the first week, on the Burger’s King facebook page the video made over 3 million views, 15 million impressions, 18.000 interactions with 98% positive sentiment. The social campaign’s video appeared on the most important Italian newspapers, blogs, radio and TV shows, reaching more than 6 million people who talked about Burger King and its new restaurants before they even opened. And 1,5 millions euro earn media return.

After a few days, also The Simpson’s Facebook page mentions #KingofUmarells and jokes with campaign.