Arby’s Social Stunts & Activations
ROAR Groupe / Moxie work for Arby’s Restaurants | 2016-2021
Not every social stunt needs to cost millions of dollars to be effective. If the idea is good, it’ll make itself viral.
When we had a budget over $50K, that was a lot—and most of that went to our travel budget. Our day-to-day social content team was always tapped as the “boots on the ground” guerrilla marketing crew for every event we came up with.
Most of these activations involved “breaking” a social channel in some way or being the “first-to-market” brand to try something. We had awesome clients at Arby’s, and they were always willing to try out the ideas we came up with.
We also had the opportunity to represent the brand at several live activations including SXSW Gaming, Awesome Games Done Quick, E3, Anime Expo and MomoCon.
Teaser image for the brand’s first Facebook Live event, “Porktraits”
Improve the fan experience and create memorable moments.
From live events on Facebook and Instagram to real-time, experiential activations using Twitter and Instagram, we constantly pushed the envelope on how social media could make followers love the brand even more.
Arby Art Drops
Live Experiential Event Activations + Twitter Campaigns
What if you could jump the line at E3 rather than waiting hours to play the newest title? What if you could get exclusive swag from your favorite anime not normally available to the general public? And what if Arby’s was the brand making it all possible because they are as big in your fandom as you are?
We worked with our gaming and anime partners before an event to build cardboard creations that would be used as “Art Drops” at each event. The partners would approve what time a “Drop” would happen on Twitter, especially since many of the pieces we built for E3 involved games who were only just being announced at big, live press events.
The partner would also have a prize ready to award the person who found the Art Drop. Our team would be on site, hide the art as discreetly as we could, snap a cryptic photo, and send the picture and copy to the official Arby’s account to tweet out. At least one member of the team would stay close by the Drop spot to monitor the item and wait for it to be found. The lucky fan who claimed the build would find a slip attached to the item containing Arby’s Gift Cards and a handwritten note (all of which I wrote!) detailing their secret prize.
Prizes included:
The Art Drops
Not gonna lie, this was approved SO quickly by the clients that I didn’t have time to make all the builds due to how many other planned posts I was already making (including Howl’s Moving Castle)—which meant Jen got roped in to make more than half of them as the partners would send in the artwork.
All three of us (Jen, B.K. and I) were the on-the-ground team at E3 hiding the builds and rewarding the winners.
Partners
The Team
The #ArbysArtDrop activation at E3 was so successful on the brand front that when Bandai Namco approached Arby’s about joining them less than a month later at Anime Expo, we jumped on it. Thanks to how many anime-related posts we’d already done on our planned social channels, we had a lot of cardboard builds already made we could get into the hands of fans—which I was always in favor of over having them sitting in boxes. And with a little more time than we had for E3, I got a chance to build my own version of the Ni No Kuni II crown.
Thanks to family vacation plans, I couldn’t do both events back-to-back that year—so Jen and B.K. were the on-the-ground team at AX hiding the builds and rewarding the winners.
Partners
The Team
This Art Drop was almost an afterthought because we’d already committed to partnering with Volpin Props to build a life-size version of the character “Nightmare” from the Soul Calibur video game series. The Arby’s booth was home to a full gaming activation with Bandai Namco where people could preview Soul Calibur VI and add “fan art” to the giant Nightmare build.
Jen and I were the on-the-ground team at AX hiding the builds and rewarding the winners while our project manager Cameron Mendenhall ran the booth. The last two photos are ones we took of each other as we patiently waited for people to find the build we’d hidden after the Tweet went live. Glamorous life.
Partners
The Team
Arby’s Sauce Fonts:
Saucy_AF and Fancy_AF
May 16, 2018 (Saucy_AF) and May 16, 2019 (Fancy_AF)
GOLD ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Art Direction (for Saucy_AF)
SILVER ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Innovative Use of Technology (for Saucy_AF)
BRONZE ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Branded Content (for Saucy_AF)
Yes, I was really allowed to design and name a font “Saucy_AF” in 2018, and follow it up with a second, more decorative font named “Fancy_AF” in 2019.
The “AF” (of course) means, “Arby’s Font” or, “Arby’s Foundry” if you prefer.
As a joke in 2018, we created a post that read, “Our New Year’s resolution is the same as last year” with an image I drew in Arby’s Sauce that said “1200×1200 / 72 ppi.” It was a design joke referring to the dimensions of our standard social posts, but it kicked off a slew of comments asking if Arby’s would make a typeface based on my Sauce Writing. Which is really funny to me, because there’s no set “font” I base it on. It’s literally, “start writing and see what happens.” When we did our next round of ideation, I suggested we follow through with the requests and make a font.
When Arby’s agreed, we decided to start simple. Saucy_AF is an all-uppercase font plus numerals and all of the diactritical marks and special characters to make it a usable font. I had a full character sheet next to me as I worked, and crossed off each character as I drew and photographed it. After we had the full set, Jen delivered the images to her friend Danny Hong; who had made TrueType and OpenType fonts for Moxie before. It’s Danny’s screen-recordings you see in the videos tracing each of the letters and vectorizing them.
We won three Atlanta Ad Club Addy Awards for Saucy_AF, and the award submission copy has been adapted below.
– Ad Age
– Fast Company
– The Verge
Ever take a good look at the inside of a Classic Roast Beef or Beef ‘N Cheddar wrapper? There’s a “brick” pattern imprinted on it, and that made a perfect lined sheet for me to slide under the tray liner sheets to make sure all of the characters were the same height.
Because Saucy_AF lacked lowercase letters, it gave us the chance to go back to the drawing board in 2019 and create Saucy’s swishy sister, “Fancy_AF”—an OpenType font with multiple Swash capitals and a full set of lowercase letters that work with either font.
Arby’s fans think it’s cool that Aryb’s writes with sauce in their social media content. So cool in fact, they received several requests from their Twitter followers to help them create similarly saucy messages.
Fans wanted a way to mimic Arby’s celebrated writing style, so all we needed to do was make it easy for them to create their own messages and notes in our signature style.
In 2018, the quickest way to deliver this while offering the most creative freedom was clear: a free, custom font.
No matter the message, Arby’s can make it better with sauce.
Arby’s would put in the work to create our very own sauce font– a QSR first– and make it readily available for download and use by fans and followers everywhere.
We set out to create a proprietary Arby’s sauce font, Saucy_AF (AF = Arby’s Font), then place it on public sites via simple download links.
We wrote out the entire alphabet in sauce, then rasterized and digitized the whole set.
The resulting font is perfect for any occasion – especially when you’re feeling a bit saucy.
The Arby’s Sauce font is available for download on the Arby’s website and on MyFonts.com. This font was then regularly used by Arby’s followers and within our own social creative (alongside papercraft and food craft).
In an era where most companies are wary of inviting open creativity from its social-savvy base, Arby’s dared to offer a unique creative asset to anyone and everyone. This led to an overall boost in goodwill– with zero backlash, controversy or negativity!
As of the writing of the Addy’s entries in 2018, there had been 7,406 unique downloads of the font.
The client measured success based on engagement (downloads) and by write ups. Many different news outlets featured articles featuring the Sauce Font.
The Team
Two reasons I’m proud of this one:
• It’s my handwriting (in Arby’s Sauce) translated into two fonts
• I convinced the clients that “AF” stood for “Arby’s Font”
#MakeMySandwich
Twitter Activation – September 12-16, 2018
SHORTY AWARD WINNER for Art Direction
GOLD ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Art Direction – Campaign, Social Media Campaign and Online Campaign
SILVER ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Social Media Single Execution
Arby’s decided to position themselves as a “Sandwich Shop” in 2018 and introduced H. Jon Benjamin (the voices of both Archer from “Archer” and Bob from “Bob’s Burgers”) as their new “Head of Sandwiches.”
To support the campaign and show off the variety of choices Arby’s had on their menu, we were asked to come up with a stunty social campaign that would get press. Arby’s had also purchased the @Sandwich handle on Instagram and asked us what type of content would ultimately live there.
Hence, #MakeMySandwich was born. The activation itself lived primarily on Twitter, but we also did a combined Facebook/Instagram Live event and did a special day’s worth of content on Instagram Stories.
In order to have a sandwich portrait made, all viewers had to do was tweet, “Hey @Arbys, #MakeMySandwich” during the three days of non-stop sandwich portraits our team participated in. After those first three days, Sandwich Portraits became another medium for us to make regular social posts in as long as Arby’s wanted to keep the Head of Sandwiches persona in their TV ads.
This campaign won us a SLEW of awards, so I’m including the writeup we used for one of those awards submissions below. The award I’m most proud of is our Gold in Art Direction at the Shorty Awards in 2019—and not just because I was the Art Director and got to go to New York with two of our clients to attend the awards ceremony and pick it up. I’m proudest of that award because we were against some seriously awesome competition that had much, much bigger budgets than we had. Our small, scrappy team pulled off making “food art” worthy of an Art Direction award.
Arby’s wanted to own sandwich on social. They sought to refresh their “We Have the Meats” brand message to shift focus towards overall sandwich variety and bring Arby’s to the forefront of the sandwich conversation. The challenge was to disrupt the sandwich conversation on social by driving buzz and engagement in a way that no other QSR had done before.
Our most successful social content relied on delivering user requests with a unique aesthetic: papercraft creations made from humble Arby’s packaging materials. If we could find a way to use sandwich ingredients in a similar fashion, the resulting creative would attract attention and encourage follower requests and shares.
During the launch of Arby’s new sandwich-centric messaging, Arby’s social media would post a series of “Sandwich Portraits” that leverages a unique hashtag (#MakeMySandwich) and encouraged followers to send in requests and share among friends.
Social is full of selfies. Our big idea was to evolve the successful Arby’s packaging papercraft into real-time, quick response, social portraits of celebrities, influencers and symbols from nerd culture, and everyday Arby’s fans. We knew once fans started seeing these sandwich portraits go live, everybody would want one.
To kick it off, we asked celebrities and friends of the brand to tag @Arbys with seeded requests. We then created portraits using only Arby’s Sandwich ingredients and replied to the user with the finished asset. After the first few went live, sandwich portrait requests started rolling in on Twitter. Over the course of 3 weeks, we made more than 100 fully unique sandwich portraits. These were shared across multiple platforms like Twitter replies, a two-hour FB Live, build-along videos, IG stories, carousels, galleries and more.
We produced over 100 hyper personalized handmade pieces of content for social within hours of brand fans requesting it, what’s more modern marketing than that? The #MakeMySandwich campaign was an authentic way to educate new and potential followers about the client’s sandwich variety while upholding the look, feel, voice, and tone Arby’s is known for on social and avoiding an overt, off-putting product message.
Street cred. Wendy’s, one of Arby’s key market competitors, asked for a sandwich and we delivered (but with an Arby’s hat of course) to the delight of fans all over social.
This campaign not only ushered Arby’s to the forefront of the sandwich conversation, but also drove 1:1, personalized communications with their most loyal fans in an authentic way. Arby’s wanted to own sandwich on social and that’s exactly what we did.
The Team
Nightmare from “Soul Calibur VI”
Experiential Event Activations in partnership with Bandai Namco and Volpin Props – July 5-8 (Anime Expo) and August 3-4, 2018 (EVO)
The. Biggest. Activation. We. Ever. Did.
Arby’s Escape Room
Instagram Story Activation – June 24-25, 2019
SHORTY AWARDS FINALIST for Gamification
GOLD REGIONAL AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Innovative Use of Interactive/Technology
SILVER ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Innovative Use of Interactive/Technology
See the activation:
Jen started off one of our brainstorms in 2019 off with “I want to make a virtual escape room,” and then had no chance to work on it herself.
Orin, Hughston and I ended up doing the entire storyline, presentation, design, filming, editing, testing—even the day-of posting. Hughston did ALL of the graphic design and individual frame editing, and that was a HUGE amount of assets to generate (I don’t even know how she got any sleep and still got it done).
Start-to-finish, the Escape Room took almost 6 hours played out on Instagram Stories and had almost 100 frames, the limit for an Instagram Story highlight. You can view the completed game on Instagram in about six-and-a-half minutes if you watch all of the videos.
Why Instagram Stories? The features built into Instagram were perfect for gamification; the Location, @Mention, #Hashtag, Donation, Music, Poll, Question, Countdown, Emoji Slider and Quiz Stickers could all be used for clues and puzzles. And we wanted to be one of the first-to-market companies to leverage Instagram Stories that way. We used as many endemic IG features as we could like filters and effects; and the ease of going back through the Story to revisit clues before having to answer a puzzle.
I felt bad, because Jen was SO into making an Escape Room happen on Instagram; and we presented it as a concept at least three months in a row. The clients were really into us pulling it off once we’d gone from “concept” phase into “storyline writing.” But her role as Creative Director had shifted and she was leading both Arby’s and Walmart internal social—and Walmart needed more of her time. So I got to take the lead on this project and blow it up. Orin, Hughston and I stayed late after work one night developing the entire storyline on colored Post-It Notes so we could rearrange them and figure out where there were any holes.
I have a thing for laying everything out IRL before going digital—especially with something as complex as the story we came up with. I then took our wall of Post-Its and made it into the widest Illustrator file I’ve ever built—keeping the colors from the Post-Its we’d used, because each color represented a different story aspect. For example, the magenta Post-Its were “Achievements” and the chartreuse were frames where we would use a native Instagram sticker to engage the players in a puzzle.
Another key color were the salmon Post-Its; they represented places where we wanted players to leave the Escape Room IG Story and go elsewhere on Instagram. We wanted to put clues on as many other Instagram accounts as we could, especially @Sandwich and the Arby’s Foundation since Arby’s operated both; but we thought it would be a better game if we linked off to A LOT of accounts.
As a partner of the Arby’s Foundation, we also linked off to the No Kid Hungry page; and for fun we worked with influencer Professor Shyguy and used some of his music.
But sometimes you need to create a totally new, random account: that was how @thesaucepump came to life.
The trend of super-curated “art” accounts (with deep-sounding captions that mean nothing) on Instagram was something we thought would be exactly the type of trend Arby’s would lampoon. We spent an entire day in the Moxie Studio making the content for @thesaucepump with whatever red, blue, white and “cardboard-brown” pieces we could find in Moxie’s prop storage closet, brought from home, or purchased inexpensively from our local Sam Flax art supply store. Oh, and three one gallon bottles with Ghirardelli Sauce pumps attached to them.
I think we had the most fun making all of the content for this page hardly anyone would see. Hughston has a particularly good write-up on her portfolio site since she Art Directed all of the images titled, “The Understated Elegance of a Sauce Pump.”
Actual shooting of the Escape Room took place at one of Arby’s corporate-owned-and-run restaurants here in Atlanta from 10PM until midnight. We had to wait until the restaurant’s lobby was closed for the night so we wouldn’t be in the way of patrons.
To promote the room, we had a countdown frame posted on IG Story with the Coundown Sticker that players could click on to be alerted when the room went live. There was also an organic static post that went up on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram directing people to come play starting at noon on Instagram Story. That organic post was also where everyone could leave Comments on Instagram throughout the game.
We left numeric clues everywhere from food clues involving cookies and sauce packets. We hid a message in the Menu Boards, used our own phone screen background that had been released earlier that year when Orange Cream Shakes came back on the menu, and designed our own app called “Tender” as a spoof on the Tinder dating app (and ours had a chicken tender worked into it, of course).
“Tender” and its resulting Achievement represent the very self-aware and tongue-in-cheek humor we’ve worked very hard to integrate into Arby’s social voice since I’ve been on the account. That’s one reason we had to make a nod to Nihilist Arby’s, too.
If you count the number of Achievements we planned on the magenta Post-Its, there were only ever going to be ten of them even though we had designed the screen for 16—we wanted players to believe they had somehow missed a step or two and done the puzzles wrong. But that was just us / Arby’s being intentionally snarky; and gave us room to revisit doing another Escape Room in the future to fill in the “missing” Achievements.
(And we did indeed get a LOT of comments asking what the other Achievements were supposed to be. Snark FTW.)
Arby’s is all about their sauces. Whether you’re a fan of Arby’s Sauce or Horsey Sauce (or not), sauces are a way of life at Arby’s.
Since Arby’s already owned the @sandwich Instagram handle, we looked into whether anything sauce-related was available. Rather than create yet another channel we would need to generate monthly content for, @thesaucepump became a one-off-barely-related-to-Arby’s landing destination for one of the puzzles in the Escape Room activation.
I have an assortment of random stuff at home in my crafting / making supplies, so I brought in two huge tubs of red, blue and white/silver bits and pieces: colored paper, bottle caps, kitchen sponges, Red and Blue SOLO Cups, Gummi Bears, gummi bears, fabric, ribbon, fake fur, popsicle sticks, spools of thread, to-go food boxes, strawberries, Arby’s red straws… we used anything that fit the color scheme. The dark blue piece of “Grover fur” and the red Arby’s vinyl bag got a lot of use.
Oh, and three one-gallon bottles with Ghirardelli Sauce pumps attached to them which we filled with Elmer’s Glue dyed different colors. It’s REALLY not milk.
Hughston went to town arranging the items and Orin wrote all the captions.
This is a selection of the more than 50 images we shot to fill the grid on Instagram.
(And yes, the page is still live)
Over the last year, we have helped Arby’s grow its Instagram following by 18.5% and have established it as one of the top QSRs on social. To keep this momentum and stand out from the ever-present influx of social media chatter, Arby’s challenged us to drive engagement time on Instagram for longer than three seconds, which is longer than the average amount of time spent engaging per story frame.
With that in mind, we set out to innovate within the channel in a way nobody else had done, all while driving in-depth engagement––to move beyond talking at an audience into playing with and alongside Arby’s audience.
Arby’s is known for innovation in social and is always looking for new ways to break the mold and do something new and crazy. We decided to do something that’s never been done before: hack Instagram and build a game within the channel itself. The game? Escape Room. The setting? An actual Arby’s restaurant, recreated inside the Instagram Live feature. For our Arby’s Escape Room, we jumped on the popularity of real-life escape rooms to create a social-based Escape Room game.
This is how the game is played: Together, as one decision-making team, users work to make choices via Instagram Story features like polls in order to escape the room––in real time on Arby’s Instagram channel.
How we pulled it off: Our team started by constructing a frame-by-frame breakdown to plan and build out all outcomes for the Escape Room story’s narrative. A decision tree with all possible story directions was used to create 97 unique Instagram videos, boomerangs, photos, animation and graphics. As a bonus surprise to our viewers, we created a new “Secret” unbranded Instagram page with 51 unique posts. Easter eggs, red herrings and clues took users outside the channel to hunt down answers from influencer partners and other unexpected sources. We shot custom content in-store, wrote the game’s story, built additional visual elements and put it all together into a playable game.
With the exception of one paid teaser post leading up to the Escape Room, the entire game was posted organically—and the resulting metrics blew our expectations out of the water.
We saw a great number of responses that showed how people enjoyed Escape Room, with some even mentioning that they would go to Arby’s to get a sandwich!
The Team
Live Events
Live Social Event Activations
Jen and B.K. created unboxing videos and Let’s Play content for years before being on the Arby’s team. So having a knowledge of not only streaming but the software needed to run it was invaluable when we pitched doing, “live, long-form content influenced by the fans.”
Before every other brand jumped on the “Gaming is the future” hype train, we were convinced that gaming fans would tune in for longer events if they happened during lunch time. Nobody is “supposed” to eat at their desk, but we know that’s the norm – so giving people who were used to watching longer content already on YouTube or Twitch something to watch during their lunch was ideal. Especially if they could influence the stream or build-along.
We tried getting Arby’s on Twitch for years without success – the closest we ever got was being part of the Awesome Game Done Quick livestream in 2019.
The Live Events
Our first-ever live event… using the limited-time offering Pork Belly as the star.
The Team
After the success of the “Porktraits” Facebook Live event, we were ready to do another one before the holidays. This time, we’d be live-crafting holiday ornaments by request on the livestream. Because of the overwhelming number of video game and anime fandom requests during Porktraits, we leaned into that audience being the most engaged (no surprise) and called our holiday event, “Geek the Halls.”
For the post that went live the day before teasing out the event, I made ornaments from a cross-section of fandoms:
Similar to Porktraits, we ran a teaser post the day before and started the live feed at noon ET to catch the lunch crowd.
B.K. kept the chat audience engaged throughout the hour+ live event with “Holiday Nerd Trivia” at the bottom of the screen. Jen worked on the left side of the screen while I was on the right. My first build was Orko from “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” while Jen built a Poké Ball from “Pokémon.”
In all, we made a total of 10 ornaments in just over an hour.
The Team
We prepared a list of nerd-friendly movies, shows, games and comics; then crafted unique valentines LIVE on Facebook for fans to give to their friends on V-Day.
This was a departure from previous livestreams as we DID NOT take live requests for the builds; instead, we took live requests for the copy on each valentine, inviting the chat to help us think up the funniest/punniest lines for each card. 2-3 lines were selected, then shown on-screen for the chat to vote on (A, B, or C).
We ran a teaser post the day before (Thursday, February 9) and started the live feed at noon ET to catch the lunch crowd.
Similar to “Geek the Halls,” Jen and I worked opposite each other under the camera to make two Valentines at once.
We tried to prep some early materials and elements to help increase the number of completed builds within 1-2 hours to avoid disappointment in the chat from fans whose requests weren’t fulfilled.
BUT… 10 must be our magic number; because even with planning ahead we still finished only 10 before 1 pm ET.
The Team
Our first-ever build-along event where the Instagram audience determined what we did next.
The Team
Coming Soon!
The Team
Coming Soon!
The Team