Keeping Fortnite Fresh
View the case- Brand
- Wendy's
- Year
- 2018
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Arcade & Action
- Platform
- In-Game
- Agency
- VMLY&R
- Added
- October 2026
- 1
The stunt begins outside the game: Wendy's tweets that it is declaring for Team Pizza because Team Burger's Durr Burger stores its beef in freezers, and directs followers to a live Fortnite broadcast on its Twitch channel.
- 2
The action plays out entirely inside Epic's existing Food Fight mode, with no custom game built for the campaign: the Wendy's squad plays as the Fable outfit, a red-haired girl in pigtails read as the brand's logo mascot, fighting for Team Pizza against Team Burger's Durr Burger side.
- 3
Rather than hunting enemy players, the Wendy's avatar runs straight to burger-team ground like the Durr Burger restaurant in Greasy Grove, pickaxes every freezer it finds until it shatters, levels the rest of the building, then moves on to the next burger joint to repeat the process.
- 4
The declared objective is not kills but eliminating every burger-side freezer in the game, narrated on stream in Wendy's sassy voice as a 'war on frozen beef,' while enemy players are mostly left alone.
- 5
Wendy's opens its lobbies to the public, inviting viewers to drop into the same matches and smash freezers alongside the brand.
- 6
The broadcast runs as an unbroken string of matches for more than nine hours, played by the agency team as ordinary-looking accounts rather than professional streamers, with Twitch chat and Twitter feeding the joke back in real time.
- 7
The payoff lands after the stream ends: Epic Games patches Food Fight and removes the burger freezers from the mode, erasing the target the whole campaign was built around.
Objective
Wendy's has claimed "fresh, never frozen beef" for over 50 years, but that message was going stale with an audience that tunes out ads — gamers on Twitch and Fortnite. When Epic Games launched Fortnite's Food Fight mode, pitting a burger joint against a pizza place, Wendy's spotted that the in-game burger restaurant stored its beef in freezers and used it to make its old claim relevant again, without buying a single ad.
Solution
Viewers who tuned into twitch.tv/wendys found the Wendy's brand itself at the controller, playing Fortnite's Food Fight mode in an outfit styled to read as the chain's red-haired, pigtailed mascot. Wendy's declared for Team Pizza on Twitter, then dropped into match after match and beelined for the Durr Burger restaurant in Greasy Grove — pickaxing the freezers apart before touching the building, and ignoring every rival player in its way. The stream ran continuously for more than nine hours, with Wendy's cracking wise in its usual sassy voice on Twitter and rallying viewers to squad up and help smash the next freezer. There was no scripted end point: the session simply kept running, freezer after freezer, restaurant after restaurant.
Results
- 250K+
- live stream views
- 1.5M+
- total minutes watched
- 4K+
- new channel followers
- 119%
- increase in social mentions
The Twitch stream drew more than 250,000 live views and over 1.5 million total minutes watched, with roughly 3,000 concurrent viewers and 4,000+ new channel followers gained during the broadcast itself. Social mentions of Wendy's rose 119% across platforms.
