The Campaign

Knowing just how hard it can be to talk in the morning before your coffee, we changed how people order their breakfast. We took the technology used to make rush hour traffic more efficient, and applied it to the drive-thru. With the Brekk-E-Tag, customers could now order their favourite breakfast with a beep. No more tedious talking when you’re tired.

Execution

Brekk-e-tag was trialled at the Hungry Jack’s Tumbi Umbi store on the New South Wales Central Coast. This store was selected because of its strong and regular drive-thru trade (accounting for nearly 60% of total business). On the day of launch, our activation team handed out 300 Brekk-e-tags to drive-thru customers, installing them in their cars and helping with their online registration. One essential component of our execution was the ability to collect key data from our customer sample and help us build consumer profiles that would drive a number of restaurant level operational efficiencies. By allowing the restaurant access to stored orders, it would allow closer stock management and increased customer experience personalization opportunities. We also created 2 online films and seeded them through Facebook: one humorously dramatizing the benefit; the other a 'how-to' guide.

The campaign garnered 113 pieces of coverage over 24 hours reaching more than 20 million viewers, readers or listeners with a PR value worth $9.3 million (PR value measured as advertising value times three). In addition to television coverage on Sunrise, the Brekk-E-Tag story was featured on the Today Show and Seven and Nine nightly news bulletins across the country. Most of the country’s major radio stations mentioned the story in news bulletins and the story appeared on 45 online websites including all major News Corp titles. Our goal was to raise awareness of HJ's breakfast offering – the traction gained by the media coverage generated a 400% increase in awareness of HJ's breakfast and positioned Hungry Jack’s as a leader in innovation in the breakfast segment.

The Situation

Hungry Jack's – Australia's version of Burger King - has historically played second fiddle to the country's largest QSR (McDonald's), both from a budget and footprint perspective. In order to generate enough media coverage to counteract McDonald's massively larger media spend we needed to create innovative and newsworthy work. The Brekk-e-tag was original, solved a business problem and generated enough PR to drown out a much larger media spend.

The Strategy

Our strategy was to increase awareness of Hungry Jack's as a breakfast destination by creating an interesting activation that would generate wider interest from the media and the public. We started by tapping into our demographic's morning behaviour. We knew that 60% of overall traffic came from drive-thru and that breakfast is a strongly habitual daypart – people order the same thing each morning. We also knew that yelling into the speaker box – especially first thing in the morning – was the least favourite part of the experience. By providing existing customers with a Brekk-e-tag for their cars, we were making their morning routine faster and easier – whilst at the same time creating wider interest in the innovation. This activation was conducted as a real-world test, with an eye to future roll-out of the technology in other Hungry Jack's drive-thrus around Australia.