• Brand Burger King
• Project Football Your Way
• Services Video seeding and digital outreach
• Date 26 May 2008
• Headline 3m+ views

Background: the bootyful game

Given no previous affiliation with football, and lacking the budgets of the official sponsors, Burger King needed to adopt a cheeky, subversive approach in order to hijack buzz around Euro 2008, and used a saucy video with a sting in the tail to provoke debate about the state of the beautiful game.

Challenge: engage mouthy football fans

DLKW and Initiative asked Unruly Media to engage with mouthy football fans, and to use the film to drive viewers to a campaign microsite where they could join in forum conversations and download vouchers for the new Angus 6 Pack.

Solution: digital outreach to top footy blogs

Football blogs are often home to astonishingly vibrant conversations amongst fans, with some, such as The Spoiler, tackling exactly the issues of celebrity and player behaviour that DLKW's campaign was trying to tap into. Unruly Media executed a bespoke outreach programme to the UK's top 100 independent football bloggers in order to situate the viral film in exactly the right conversational context.

Result: true viral hit + business success

• 3m+ views
• 4.6% clickthrough rate
• 20,000+ voucher downloads

Unruly Media achieved 38 high-value, contextually-relevant editorial placements for the video. While these placements generated a significant number of views by themselves, exceeding campaign targets within the first two weeks, they also got people talking about the issues and passing the video on.

Thousands of viewers forwarded the video and dozens of people downloaded the file and re-uploaded it to their own accounts on video sharing sites, thus demonstrating extremely strong affinity with the content and providing an extraordinary quantity of free media, with one fan-uploaded instance to Break generating over 1.6m plays during the 7-week campaign window.

As there was no other advertising or PR activity around the film, the full value of this earned media could be traced back to the seeding and outreach activity undertaken by Unruly.

Viral success, with millions of free views, always gives people a warm fuzzy feeling. But, ask the cynics, so what? Does it shift brand favourability? Does it shift product? Burger King's Bootyful Game shows definitively that this can be done.

The video was extremely effective at driving viewers to the FootballYourWay microsite, with a recorded clickthrough rate of 4.6%. Web analytics on the microsite confirmed that over 20,000 voucher downloads were directly attributable to this traffic, so viral success contributed significantly against the overarching campaign objectives of driving store footfall and increasing sales of the Angus 6 Pack.

Aside: life outside of YouTube

Although YouTube enjoys dominant market share in many territories, it's not the only game in town. In this campaign, Break outperformed YouTube 5-to-1 for earned media. How come? Partly demographics. Break's demographic much more closely reflects the 18-35 male audience this film was targeted at, whereas YouTube's demographic no longer skews in any interesting way from the demographic of the internet population at large. Partly, intensity of competition. With 450,000 videos uploaded to YouTube every day, uploading to sites where competition for attention is less intense can make a lot of sense. Partly, of course, pure luck.

This nicely illustrates the importance of uploading video content to a broad and appropriate mix of video sharing sites as a matter of campaign hygiene, especially where a niche audience is being targeted.

Agency credits

• Creative: DLKW
• Production: Contentment
• Media: Initiative
• Seeding: Unruly Media