This is a story of an idea that never should have been made because it rejected all conventions and defied logic. And because of that was absurdly effective.

BACKGROUND:

At the time of this campaign, mobile ordering via apps had been growing 140% year on year.(2) Which is why we invest a lot in technology to transform how we serve guests — and the mobile app is core to that ambition.

To be honest, our app wasn’t a game changer. At the time of this initiative, we didn’t leapfrog the competition, we caught up with order-ahead functionality and mobile payments.

CREATIVE CHALLENGE:

How do you ignite a conversation about nothing new and, in doing so, take the 686th app,(3) 14th among our competition,(4) and make it #1?

CREATIVE SOLUTION:

Fact: In the U.S., Burger King has only half the number of locations of

McDonald’s.(5) So, customers have to go a little farther to go to get their hands

on our burgers — an average of 1.34 miles.(6)

Insight: If our updated app gave you the ability to order Burger King from anywhere, what if “anywhere” included our rival’s restaurants?

Strategy: Use marketing jiu jitsu to turn McDonald’s much larger footprint into our advantage by turning all of them into Burger Kings.

The Idea: Now you can buy a Whopper for 1 cent — only “at” McDonald’s.

For 9 days, we would give away a flame-grilled Whopper for one cent to any guest who downloaded the Burger King App, added their credit card info, enabled geolocation, drove to a McDonald’s, ordered from there and then drove to a Burger King to pick up the order. The opposite of what any direct marketing campaign should do. And yet, people were lovin’ it.

EXECUTION:

We geofenced 14,000 McDonald’s stores nationwide (and 7,000 Burger Kings). If a user was within 600 feet of a McDonald’s, the BK App unlocked the promotion, and once the order was placed, the app then navigated them to the nearest BK for pickup. The logistics to get this 9-day promotion off the ground were staggering.

We kicked off the promotion with a tweet from Burger King’s handle: “brb going to McDonald’s.” And then, all hell broke loose, getting 645,000 likes in a matter of hours.

We used Insta-worthy OOH outside of McDonald’s, a handful of print ads and a tiny bit of paid digital. We knew we had an idea that was impossible to ignore and irresistibly shareable, so the idea didn’t need traditional media. It needed co-conspirators to join in.

Let’s be honest, this idea could have died a thousand deaths. Legal could have killed it. Marketing could have stopped it. Heck, the agency should probably never have kept working on it. And in the end, it worked. It didn’t just launch a revamped app, it truly redefined Burger King’s perspective on what creativity can do for business and introduced a new genre of marketing — geo-conquesting.