Keeping Fortnite Fresh

Objective

Wendy's is known for its "fresh, never frozen beef" positioning. When Fortnite launched the Food Fight game mode in 2019 featuring a fictional burger chain (Durr Burger) storing meat in freezers, Wendy's identified an opportunity to reinforce its core brand message while engaging gamers who typically block traditional advertising.

Solution

VMLY&R Kansas City created a playable Wendy's avatar within Fortnite's Food Fight mode, which pitted Team Burger against Team Pizza; since Team Burger stored its beef in freezers, Wendy's joined Team Pizza and used its avatar to systematically destroy in-game freezers rather than kill other players. The nine-plus-hour session was played by the VMLY&R team itself (including creative director McKay Hathaway and copywriter Nate Steele) as regular users rather than professional esports players, and was live-streamed on Twitch, encouraging the player community to destroy freezers in their own gameplay and share user-generated content. With no paid media budget, the campaign used this "Trojan Horse" approach to bypass ad-blockers instead of buying traditional in-game logos or billboards. Players' collective participation prompted Epic Games to replace the freezers with fresh beef facilities in the game.

Results

The campaign accumulated over 1.5 million minutes of Twitch viewership across a livestream that ran for more than nine hours, despite having no paid media budget, and within a few hours Wendy's became one of the platform's top users overall, not just among brands. Social mentions rose 119%. At Cannes Lions 2019 the campaign won a Grand Prix (Social & Influencer), 2 Gold, 5 Silver and 1 Bronze Lion, plus 5 Shortlists. The campaign is also credited with helping Wendy's overtake Burger King as the No. 2 burger chain in the U.S. by sales, with digital business rising to over 6% of total U.S. sales — more than double its previous baseline.