Last year, Wendy’s dethroned Burger King to become the No. 2 burger chain in America. But the category leader, McDonald’s, still outnumbered us three to one in restaurants. That’s a problem when mealtime decisions are made impulsively and our competition has a restaurant on every block. Therefore, Wendy’s challenge is to climb the ladder of consumers’ minds by getting in front of them more frequently and in more memorable ways than our competition.

Last year, Wendy’s dethroned Burger King to become the No. 2 burger chain in America. But the category leader, McDonald’s, still outnumbered us three to one in restaurants. That’s a problem when mealtime decisions are made impulsively and our competition has a restaurant on every block. Therefore, Wendy’s challenge is to climb the ladder of consumers’ minds by getting in front of them more frequently and in more memorable ways than our competition.

So how do we keep up with the scale of our competition? By going places they can’t. Enter the Wendyverse. A virtual reality world all about the Wendy’s brand. Part restaurant, part Wendy’s amusement park. What better place to reach your audience than a world where your competition can’t exist? Thus, we created an environment where the only messages being communicated are about the Wendy’s brand. No clutter. No competition. Just Wendy’s.

If you’re going to build a virtual world, then you might as well do it with the backing of the largest social platform in the real world, Meta. Their launch of Horizon Worlds provided an unprecedented scale when it comes to world-building in virtual reality, combined with Meta Quest’s record-breaking hardware sales in 2021. Horizon also provided an exponentially more immersive experience than other platforms more akin to gaming, such as Roblox.

To build something truly great, we would need builders. But we didn’t just want to invade the Horizon world — we wanted to build a world that Horizon users would want to invade. So we partnered with existing builders and communities within Horizon to architect and build a truly authentic and entertaining world that virtual reality users would want to invade.

If you’re going to build a virtual world, then you might as well do it with the backing of the largest social platform in the real world, Meta. Their launch of Horizon Worlds provided an unprecedented scale when it comes to world-building in virtual reality, combined with Meta Quest’s record-breaking hardware sales in 2021. Horizon also provided an exponentially more immersive experience than other platforms more akin to gaming, such as Roblox.

To build something truly great, we would need builders. But we didn’t just want to invade the Horizon world — we wanted to build a world that Horizon users would want to invade. So we partnered with existing builders and communities within Horizon to architect and build a truly authentic and entertaining world that virtual reality users would want to invade.

Our partnership with Horizon gave us a platform to build an entire virtual world in service to the Wendy’s brand. On April 2, 2022, we brought iconic menu offerings to life in ways only possible in the virtual world, bringing new meaning to “playing with your food.” Users could dance with our always-hot-and-crispy french fries, grab a ride on a baked potato blimp or even play various carnival-style games with our menu items.

Of course no world about Wendy’s would be complete without a restaurant. At the center of the world, we established the first virtual Wendy’s restaurant complete with brand cues such as our use of fresh, never frozen beef — our core differentiator. And the only freezer in the world contained a competitive jab at other burger chains’ use of inferior frozen beef, showing that even in the virtual world you should never settle for frozen beef.

Upon launching the Wendyverse, we became the most visited world in all of Horizon. Users came in droves to invade our world all about the Wendy’s brand, spending on average more than 11.5 minutes in the world. In fact, the Wendyverse even achieved the highest daily active users of all created worlds in Horizon during our launch. Word began to spread about our virtual Wendy’s world and generated more than 654 million earned media impressions from top-tier outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and on-air segments on Yahoo Finance. Thus, we showed that Wendy’s can break into the virtual world and create buzz in the real world.