The eternal rivalry between Burger King and McDonald's reached its most unsustainable level as more and more coupons offering increasingly larger discounts were being given out. How long will we let this price war involving kings and clowns kill our margins? How could we hack into an unsustainable coupon model and start distributing coupons in a smarter fashion, find a way out of this dead end and bring in more customers? Based on these questions, we set about coming up with a low-budget idea that would help us increase sales.

We created a risk-free coupon model using Free Fire and paid nothing for this. The idea was simple: Whopper coupons would show up on-screen for users. Players who used a coupon to buy a combo at BK would receive a code they could exchange for diamond tickets, which are worth real money in-game. People who bought themselves a Whopper would have diamonds to spend and play better. Free Fire would also make a profit from our sales.

We combined something gamers obsess about and the hunger that strikes in the middle of a gaming session. To sum up, it was a success because we spent absolutely nothing to put our coupons in-game and increased our sales substantially. Topping it off, we were the official sponsors of Free Fire Pro League Brazil Season 3 and hosted the grand finals in what was the largest livestream on YouTube Brazil in 2019.

The main audience of all of Burger King's communication is young people. People who love eating at BK and would have a Whopper every day if they could. But only if they could get a discount.

Speaking of STRONG DESIRES young people have, there's only one thing they desire as much as fast food discounts: Free Fire Diamonds! The world's most downloaded mobile GAME in 2019 quickly became a phenomenon among young people and is one of the most profitable apps in Brazil, ahead of Netflix and Tinder.

Free Fire players invest heavily into the GAME and exchange real money for diamonds, a virtual currency players use to buy in-game items, like outfits and even special weapons that can give them an edge during matches. It was by blending these two strong desires (to eat at BK and to get diamonds) together that we created the Diamond Whopper.

Diamond Whopper coupons were distributed exclusively in Free Fire so players could take a screenshot, head over to a BK to buy a Whopper and redeem their long sought-after reward: DIAMONDS. We did a collab with the game and the deal was: players who bought at BK using a coupon from the game would get diamonds to spend in Free Fire. All stood to profit from this deal, risk-free.

Activation took place over a period of four months, between October 25, 2019, through February 25, 2020, for all Free Fire players, who made a point of putting the word out that THEY COULD GET DIAMONDS BY EATING AT BURGER KING, creating several videos documenting every step of the fun saga of heading on over to a BK restaurant to win in-game rewards.

Everything that was sold at BK via coupons came with an exclusive Free Fire code. This made it possible for us to track the results of this action IN ISOLATION.

More than 360,000 Burger King combos were sold—362,631, to be precise.

This means that our hacking into the coupon model generated directly more than US$ 1.4 million in risk-free revenue for BK. WE HAD A 30.51% YoY increase in Whopper sales.

POSITIVE SIDE EFFECTS = Brand exposure.

Burger King took part in the livestreams of Free Fire’s Brazil and World Series finals, which became the FIRST AND SECOND MOST WATCHED in the history of YouTube Brazil, in 2019. We also generated over 3 million views on YouTube through content created by Free Fire community members themselves where they talked about the Diamond Whopper.