Challenge

With a summer of sport kicking off in 2024, we saw the opportunity to create a compelling campaign to captivate Burger King’s users and drive sales. It was clear there would be a huge volume of brands punting a tie-in with football over this period, so the challenge was to create a totally unique, creative campaign that would hook users in and keep them engaged.

The main target for the campaign was to see 50,000 users engage with the BK app, which was the highest engagement that had been seen with previous campaigns.

Innovation

Merkle’s proprietary insights tool identified that football was of highest interest to BK lovers. After brainstorming on how best to create a football sweepstake style campaign, we landed on the creative concept of ‘BK Footy Royale’ - a cheeky tie-in to Burger King’s Chicken Royale. Working as One dentsu, dentsu Creative’s teams provided engaging copy and creative assets to bring the campaign to life for customers. 

The fun, gamified CRM campaign allowed users to pick a team to follow and redeem delicious Burger King offers every time their team played a match in the Euros. It continued all the way through to the finals, where a little surprise awaited the winners.   

 By keeping our messaging playful and football related, we were able to capture the excitement of a summer of sport and keep customers coming back to the app.

Impact

To bring BK Footy Royale to life, Merkle developed launch, reminder and gameday comms, alongside emails, push notifications and in-app messages across 27 different touchpoints. Using BK’s playful tone of voice and fun brand, our Royale execution was spot on.  

The campaign quickly proved itself to be a hit with users, due to a combination of the gamification element of the campaign, the offers available, and the general hype around sport that we successfully leveraged. 

By the end of BK’s Footy Royale campaign, many thousands of customers had picked a football team to follow throughout the tournament – a ‘whopping’ three times the target number of sign-ups. It’s no surprise that this was BK’s most successful campaign to date in driving user engagement amongst the target audience.    

Along with this initial interest, the engagement throughout the campaign was also a factor in its success. The overall campaign saw an email open rate of 20% above the average, and a clickthrough rate almost three times higher than average gamification comms from Burger King.