Clowns are the third most sought after Halloween costume of 2017. With this in mind, the Burger King brand created its first annual ‘Scary Clown Night’ across its worldwide network, requiring participants to visit branch dressed as clowns.
The campaign, which was created by Madrid-based Lola MullenLowe agency, was launched on social media and included a ‘very scary’ video, directed by award-winning filmmaker Rodrigo Cortés - known for movies like `Buried ́ starring Ryan Reynolds and `Red Lights ́ starring Robert De Niro and Cillian Murphy.
A child is seen biking through the streets at night, being chased by an ever-increasing gang of clowns. He tries to find refuge in a Burger King location only to be confronted by a clown dressed in yellow and red (sound familiar?) demanding a Whopper. The video’s tagline — "Come as a clown, eat like a king" — is another little jab at their renowned rival.
In line with the worldwide campaign, Burger King Lebanon has drawn a lot of attention by posting the video promoting the activity on the Burger King Arabia LB Facebook page. Sweeping across social media, it was recognized worldwide for scoring the best engagement and best performing page, marking a real success story, and bringing a huge crowd of clowns to Burger King Jal el Dib branch on the night of the event, October 31st.
Marc Kallasi, General Manager for Burger King Lebanon, said that the Lebanese market is a tough and highly competitive one: “Lebanese consumers are becoming more and more jaded with everyone trying to impress them with events and activities. But for Burger King it is always about simple ideas that have great impact.”
“We are very happy with the overall activity and the exposure that we got,” said Gina Chekrallah, Marketing Manager at Burger King Lebanon. “If strategically used, social media today is a very efficient tool that returns the love to the business owner.”
Beyond creative, the strategy hit the right note on all fronts: posting time, sponsoring budget, proper targeting of each and single visual as well as the video, and close monitoring of the campaign.
“When it comes to social media marketing, if you do something good enough, you’re sure to get plenty of social recognition,” said May Georr, Managing Partner of tbsp. the creative agency that handles Burger King. “The social media world is today flooded with activities fighting to get the consumer’s attention; but for an activity to go viral, it needs to have the proper ingredients. This was the case with our activity. Burger King is a loved brand in Lebanon; the contest is exciting and the reward really tempting; as for the film, it simply had all it takes to go viral,” she added.
Clickable, playable shareable… this is the viral life cycle. All three aspects need to be strong to get a viral hit. It’s easy to nail one, a skilled team might achieve two, but it’s not that obvious to consistently score all three. tbsp. did that!
