A&W Food Services has jumped into social media with a campaign for its new sirloin Uncle Burger.
The restaurant chain’s “ultimate uncle contest” invited customers to tell A&W why they have the best uncle at UncleBurger.ca. At launch the site included a limited number of coupons for a free Uncle Burgers and visitors can still send an electronic “Uncle’s Day” greeting card and print a coupon for a Uncle Burger deal.
Tom Shepansky, a partner at Rethink, which created the promotion, said the idea was to get people talking about the Uncle Burger, drive people to the website and generate some excitement for the product.
Soon after launch, A&W employees and consumers were talking about the free burger offer on Twitter, Facebook and other message boards and blogs.
Shepansky said 10,000 visitors went to the site in the first 48 hours and all 2,000 free burgers were claimed within the first four hours. Half of all visitors also opted to receive future news updates from A&W.
David Waterfall, A&W’s Vancouver-based director of marketing, said using Facebook, Twitter and other sites was largely an experiment to see if A&W’s primary target of baby boomers are online enough to make social media an ongoing part of its marketing mix.
“We were looking at a lot of research saying an increasing numbers of baby boomers are involved in the social media sphere,” he said. “It’s not just 16-year-olds texting and using Twitter. And the results have been really pleasing for us, and it reinforced that it was something worth trying.”
A&W received more than 41,000 contest entries through the microsite, while a 2006 contest celebrating the chain’s 50th anniversary—which ran only in restaurants— received 25,000 entries.
Other discounted coupons for the Uncle Burger appeared on sites such as CraigsList and BuyAndSell.ca.
“We tried to reach out to places where you know people young and old will be going either to get a deal or join a discussion,” said Shepansky. “You just want to put your deal out there, and then people will talk on forums: Is it a good deal or not? Is it something worth eating? People will talk about the strangest things.”
A&W will also celebrate “Uncle Day” on April 19 in restaurants across Canada.
