In recent years the acceptance and support of marijuana use has been on the rise in America. The majority of US states now allow for medical use. Many states are decriminalizing use. And very recently 10 states have passed laws allowing for outright recreational use.

Even before this recent acceptance, US marijuana users have covertly celebrated cannabis culture on April 20th, aka 4/20. This firmly established covert holiday is now hitting the mainstream with pop-culture cred, vocal stoner celebs, and even large festivals such as Hippie Hill in San Francisco.

America is openly falling in love with marijuana. And a lot of those tokers turn to Wingstop to cure the resulting munchies.

The combination of weed Wingstop--an American chicken wing brand--has always been a match made in stoner heaven. In fact, the two were mentioned 23,000 times together last year on social media. So we set out to reward our ganja groupies on one of their holiest of American holidays, 4/20. There was already an uptick of sales on this day, but we needed to pry this group off their couches and get them to order Wingstop. So we leveraged one of the largest traditions for this holiday: binge-watching. And we banished it’s biggest buzzkill; seeing the same ad over and over. We introduced 4/20 High-atus, a modernized take on a movie-theater snack break commercial and applied a media buy that ensured our spots changed throughout their show. As our audience got more and more messed up, so did our commercials, leaving viewers questioning reality and craving Wingstop.

By leveraging one of the largest celebratory traditions on 4/20, we were able to use our customers’ binge-watching behavior to implement a sequential media buy that would reach them when their cravings were most intense. Our progressively trippy, illustrated commercial break videos ran on popular streaming-channels like Hulu. We also utilized digital video placements on weed-friendly publishers Viceland, Adult Swim, and FUSE to increase our reach while staying highly-relevant to our 4/20 audience. Combining the technology on these platforms and using sequential targeting, we ensured our story was told in chronological order, creating an impactful and surprising experience for consumers. To expand the scale of our campaign, we created cut-downs of our videos to run on social, targeted towards look-a-like audiences of our core, 18-34 urban consumer--those most likely to share our content. We also bought cinema placements before high-profile, weed-specific movies that were launching on 4/20, like Super Troopers 2, in key markets across the nation. On the day of 4/20, we directly interacted with fans and acquired additional content for our social channels by taking our Wingstop food truck to Hippie Hill in San Francisco to personally deliver the flavor. Finally, to reward those who celebrated 4/20 the right way (by taking a hiatus from binge-watching and ordering Wingstop) we sent 4/20-designed swag to fans. The entire campaign ran from midnight on 4/19 to the close of day on 4/20, but was able to influence over 50,000 day-of mentions of Wingstop on Twitter alone, increase transactions by 46% year-over-year, and double online order revenue year-over-year.