Case Study: Delivering the Whopper Dog
In April, Burger King launched the amazing Whopper Dog campaign.
The comical ad shows the journey a Burger King enthusiast takes to train his guide dog to find a Whopper Burger!
Burger King was aiming for the ad to generate attention amongst the broad target audience of dog lovers aged 14-49, fast-food lovers and people working in media/marketing/film. It wanted to measure their success via the number of completed views the ad received.
Before we started to distribute the ad across premium websites, we ran it through UnrulyEQ pre-testing in order to narrow the audience down and help Burger King discover which sorts of people were most likely to connect with its ad on an emotional level.
Initial reactions
UnrulyEQ custom audiences found 3 custom audiences which were most likely to resonate with the Whopper Dog ad:
- An emotional audience: This audience is made up of people who felt the most intense emotion when watching the video
- An intended audience: This audience is made up of people who purchased Burger King either once a month, or every two weeks
- An affinity audience: This audience is made up of people who prefer McDonald’s over Burger King
Each audience elicited different reactions to the Whopper Dog ad. The emotional audience was more likely to be aged between 25-24 and when they watched the ad they felt proud, amazed and happy. The intended audience was more likely to feel exhilarated and proud when watching the ad. The affinity audience were more likely to feel amazed and motivated by the ad.
Our analysis showed that after targeting the affinity audience segment with the ad, we were able to drive an increase in all key metrics – brand favorability, influence brand promoters and purchase intent, versus the standard audience target for the campaign.
What is more interesting is that the purchase intent was 38% versus 31% of the standard target audience.
Supporting Burger King to create content that travels across borders
Hofstede and Mediacom’s model then helped us to understand cultural nuances associated with the creative.
Unique cultural data testing via our partnership with Hofstede and Mediacom was employed to highlight cultural differences evoked by the Whopper dog ad in different markets, allowing Burger King to maximise the impact of their content.
The findings from the UnrulyEQ Custom audiences demonstrated that viewers within the emotional audience segment were more likely to respond to the content with feelings of amusement, amazement and happiness than the broad advertiser target audience.
However, when we look at the cultural findings we can see that the top three emotions differ – this data was incorporated into campaign targeting to drive effective distribution in the respective target markets.
Making an impact
The findings from Unruly’s emotional and cultural testing aided the audience targeting and distribution of the campaign. Unruly used a blend of both In-Stream and Out-Stream Unruly formats for the campaign distribution across premium websites.
The campaign achieved some impressive results with 1,630,043 thirty-second views, a 1.82% Engagement Rate, a 1.3% CTR, a 79.24% Complete Rate and a 0.14% Share Rate.
Short Fix
In an age where consumer attention is scarce, Burger King was keen to make their existing asset work harder because they wanted to reach new audiences. To do this, they decided to create a shorter version of their ad. We helped them to do this through the Unruly Edit Suite Short Fix. This allowed them to get their key messages across to new viewers.
Using UnrulyEQ Max & Facial Coding, we were able to shorten the ad by identifying the most emotionally impactful 6 seconds in Whopper Dog creative. Find out more about our Short Fix here.
Transforming Burger King’s existing assets
We also helped Burger King create a highly-engaging format displaying the Whopper Dog ad the same way that viewers consume content on their mobile devices: vertically.
Distributing at scale in brand-safe premium environments
Brand safety is paramount for Burger King and with our UnrulyX Shield product suite, we committed to ensuring all ads were served within trusted environments. Unruly Shield has the highest TAG brand safety certification and deploys first and third-party technology (MOAT, IAS). Providing reassurance to advertisers when it comes to ad placement.
To find out more about UnrulyEQ click here. Or get in touch with our team by clicking here to find out how we could supercharge your next ad campaign.
