Arby’s Planned Social
ROAR Groupe / Moxie work for Arby’s Restaurants | 2016-2021
There’s a lot I can say after being on this team from September 2016 to February 2021. The Arby’s account and the team I joined were the reason I chose to leave in-house marketing and go agency-side. What we had was the very definition of “lightning in a bottle.” From 2016-2021, I was part of more than 500 social posts (both planned and real-time).
Above all, I was privileged to work with some of the most talented and creative people in the business. As a team, we met Arby’s goal of being one of the most talked-about brands on social; and that started with our “Fellow Fan” approach to content creation. Through the Fellow Fan ongoing campaign, we were written up more than 50 times by various trade publications, blogs and fan sites; and we won or were nominated for a dozen awards.
My role on the team shifted over time. I joined as Senior Designer, and did almost entirely content creation in the form of paper crafts built from packaging and sauce art (my Illustration background and history with cake decorating came in very handy there). However, just because I was a “Senior Designer” on paper, my boss never let that title stop me from joining in on the concepting, art direction, photography and presenting of our ideas. Everyone on the team was an equal and all opinions and ideas mattered; and as I rose through the ranks at ROAR Groupe/Moxie, I kept up with that mentality. Creative Residents (how we referred to our interns) had just as much room to speak up in ideation and planning sessions as the CD, and that made for some incredible growth for everyone on the team.
Who are all these crazy-talented people I worked with? This list is everyone who was part of the day-to-day Creative team since I first joined it in 2016; and although some of them have moved on to other projects / other agencies / got smart and left agency life altogether, they all left their marks on the account.
Drogon from “Game of Thrones” to tease the Season 7 premiere
The average person on social media gives any content less than three seconds before they decide to scroll to the next image or video.
THREE SECONDS.
Nobody wants ads in their social feeds.
Arby’s was a FUN account to work on because they knew they were the brunt of so many jokes (Thank you, Lisa Simpson and Jon Stewart). What we achieved in social at the time was legendary.
Get people to stop scrolling and start engaging with Arby’s on social.
(That’s not a big ask at all, right?)
Stop making ads.
Get Arby’s to behave less like a brand and more like an unabashed fan.
We looked at the interests of the members of our team… and got Arby’s on board. If we were geeking out about it, then Arby’s would be, too.
We made content people actually cared about and made the food secondary.
Targeting niche audiences and interests like gaming, anime, disc golf and woodworking, we built a rabid audience who shared the niche interests the members of our team had… and it WORKED.
The industry average for brand engagement on social lands somewhere between one and three percent (1-3%), with six percent (6%) being considered “Very High.”
Arby’s Instagram engagement rate was over 12% for 2019.
Double the rate of “highly engaged” brands.
With follower growth across all channels averaging 19% YoY, we knew we had hit the “stop scrolling, start engaging” goal.
Engagement Labs also gave Arby’s credit for our niche-centric social strategy by awarding them the #3 slot in “Most Talkworthy Marketing Online” in 2018.
We also won several awards, which meant the Ad Industry liked what we were doing, too.
Selected Works
The Thousand Sunny from “One Piece”
Published December 12, 2016
The Thousand Sunny is the Straw Hats’ second pirate ship in “One Piece,” built after the Going Merry was destroyed.
The final posted version included both a gallery of images on Facebook and Instagram and a stop motion video on Facebook and Twitter.
One thing you’ll notice: There’s no food. You can tell it was shot inside of an Arby’s using the tabletop as the “water” because of the lit “A” in the background, but there’s no food shown in any of the stills. The stop motion video we created takes place on a sea of Curly Fries, but the food is secondary to the cardboard “fan art.”
Why this post is featured: This was the first “mega build” I crafted, and it took 20 hours—almost three work days—to construct.
Final Images & Behind-the-Scenes
The Team
NaNoWriMo
Published November 8, 2016
National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo was a nonprofit that promoted creative writing around the world from their founding in 1999 until its closure in March 2025.
B.K.’s line, “We’re going to need a lot more sauce… #NaNoWriMo” was perfectly paired with the infamous, “What I learned in boating school” meme from “Spongebob Squarepants” which I drew in Arby’s Sauce.
This organic post blew up:
Why this post is featured: Arby’s Sauce drawing would become something I’d get VERY good at, and we’d use it often for real-time reactions when we were in a time crunch to get a post made quickly.
The Team
Five Nights at Arby’s
Published October 29, 2019
We had wanted to do an overnight shoot at an Arby’s restaurant for a long time. With Halloween coming up, a “Five Nights at Freddy’s” jump scare video was the perfect way to make it happen. My kids are huge FNAF fans, and I really pushed making this post for them.
I’d been itching to try my hand at a more elaborate puppet than any of the others I’d made up to that point. Getting Freddy’s eyes to open was a goal I set. Freddy’s head is made from EVA foam, sheet metal, polymer clay, PEX pipe, ping pong balls, LED lights and felt.
Because of my responsibilities as co-lead for the Égalité Atlanta chapter, I couldn’t finish Freddy in time. I got his head done and had to bring him in-progress for Jen to finish and film while I was at the Out&Equal Conference in Washington, D.C.
Why this post is featured: We broke out of our cardboard and Arby’s Sauce drawing “fan art” and used different materials… and fans of the pages didn’t bat an eye.
Final Images & Behind-the-Scenes
The Team
The Champions from “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild”
Published November 9, 2017
The Four Champions from “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” got the amiibo treatment! To celebrate their release, I took the paper craft versions of each character outdoors and found environments to shoot them that mimicked their respective biomes in the game (the eagle-eyed Atlantan will probably be able to figure out exactly where at Piedmont Park each of the four of them were shot).
The final posted version included a gallery of images on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You could view Comments for the individual Champions’ images on Facebook as well (apparently, nobody liked Revali, although he was my favorite one to make).
The gallery and individual images were removed in 2020 at a request from Nintendo.
Why these builds are featured: I made a lot of “flat” cardboard creations, and these are some of my all-time favorites.
Final Images & Behind-the-Scenes
The Team
The Hardy Daytona from “Final Fantasy 7: Remake”
Published April 10, 2020
Where to even start with this one… quarantine activity? With COVID-19 hitting the U.S. at the same time I was supposed to start working on the post, this is one of the few builds done entirely on our dining room table at home. Because of that, there wasn’t any restriction on the amount of time I could spend on it… so spend time, I did. Howl’s Moving Castle previously held the record at almost 50 hours… the Hardy Daytona shattered that record and clocked in at over 120 hours.
And it’s not even finished.
That crazy exhaust pipe snaking up the side of the bike… there isn’t [currently] one on the opposite side. Engineering the paper for just one of them took roughly 6 hours, and with a deadline approaching, I couldn’t spend another 6 at the time. Since it can’t be seen when the bike is in profile other than the rear segment, I left it to finish another day. To clarify, everything else on the bike is completely symmetrical.
Oh, and did I mention this had to get approved by Square Enix JAPAN? Many of the companies/IP holders we partner with only have us deal with the North American divisions because Arby’s is a primarily North American-only restaurant chain. Because this was for such a big game launch, this post had to get approved by both North America AND Japan. There was extra urgency to get this build done quickly because we knew the approvals overseas would take longer. Since we worked with Square Enix directly, we were also given permission to use the music from the new game (!!!!!) The music in both videos is an original track from Final Fantasy VII Remake called “Let the Battle Begin.”
The final video was posted on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. A shorter video cut in vertical format was posted on TikTok.
Apparently, people really liked this build. We got a write-up from both GameSpot and GameRant over the weekend after this came out.
Why this post is featured: This was the most collaborative post among Arby’s, us, and a partner brand—Square Enix—ever. This was also the last “mega build” I’d end up creating. I didn’t know it at the time, but it’s also the most elaborate build I did.
We had permission to use different music from the new game in each spot, so we did a shorter version for TikTok and a longer version for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
So. Many. Pieces.
The Team
Jörmungandr from “God of War”
Published April 19,2018
To say I was excited when I saw the trailer for the new God of War at E3 in 2017 is an understatement. And no, it’s probably not why everyone else was excited—I am a HUGE world mythology buff. I about lost my mind when Assassin’s Creed: Origins showed the Egyptian gods in one of their trailers; and seeing Jörmungandr, the Midgard (World) Serpent from Norse mythology at the very end of the God of War trailer got me VERY intrigued for the storyline of this game. Having Kratos’ axe returned by one of Loki’s children could only mean very, very bad things.
…
I’d been telling the team that I was going to make the World Serpent for months. And not only that, I was going to make him a puppet. No stop-motion this time; I wanted to shoot a practical video with no special effects and almost no post-production. We used a combination of forced perspective and slowing down the video to make him look massive and lumbering. B.K. stood holding the Arby’s bag about 20 feet in front of the camera while I puppeteered Jörmungandr right in front of it.
The final posted version was a video on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Why this post is featured: The SONY team wanted the final build! After the post went up, I turned Jörmungandr into a permanent sculpture (with Kratos and Atreus added) and sent him to live at SONY’s Santa Monica Studio.
Jörmungandr started out as a basic clamshell box, which gradually had more and more of it cut away and reshaped to give it the rounded look his head needed. I added the “catch plates” for my fingers pretty early on, as it was fun to play with it in-progress. The articulated neck presented a totally different set of challenges; as it needed to be jointed and was going to be the sleeve I put my arm through. And what to loosely join everything together with so it could still bend and flex? Straw wrappers.
Jörmungandr is a good example of how I do most of the complex builds; I get the shell made and add layers of smaller details on top. The World Serpent looked “done” at the end of Day 1, even in the rough stage. Even if I had to stop adding anything else, it was passably finished. But, the extra layers of scales (which are mostly rough-cut squares and rectangles) and the “beard” were really necessary to make it look like the character shown in the trailers. The red foil from the sandwich wrappers layered over the goldenrod breakfast packaging gave him an “Eye of Sauron” look, which I was very happy with. And yes, the beard is a napkin that I carefully cut and shredded.
The Team
