JOHN MACALUSO
Narrative Writer
Creative Strategist
Bestest Friend
DENNY'S GETS
WAY INTO GAMING
Press Coverage: Rhys' Pieces, Ad Week, Mobile Marketer, Switch Player, Trend Hunter
THE PROBLEM:
With the pandemic keeping customers home, QSRs like Denny's were hemorrhaging marketing dollars and worried they would have to close permanently. Plus, Denny's had already publicly stated that their 2020 brand mission to use the diner booth to bring more people together.
THE INSIGHT:
My partner and I looked at how we were personally connecting with people. We're two giant nerds and so for us, that's mainly video games. But then, we looked at the stats... It went beyond nerds. Consoles were suddenly impossible to find. Gaming had transcended age and was no longer for 10 year old boys. Where was Denny's consumer? IN-GAME. Escaping from the real world.
THE IDEA:
We decided to meet the consumer where they were... Again: In the games. We created official gamertags and discord channels for Denny's Diner. Then we started playing... We'd game with fans in Call of Duty: Warzone. We'd join fans for lunch in GTA: Online.
While we played a lot of Call of Duty: Warzone with fans, we noticed Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the clear favorite. We started by designing out island, dubbing it Dennopolis, then we created a bunch of in-game SWAG to give to fans.
Fans had already started setting up their own Denny's diners on their islands, so, we decided to make them official. We put out a call for fans who wanted to be digital franchise owners, and after getting flooded with literally thousands of responses, we started doing in-person island inspections. We even got the chance to stream live with Failboat, a major Switch Streamer with a giant following.
Once island inspections were finished, we sent staff-only uniform designs and mailed out real-life, official letters to each of the new team members, signed by Denny's CEO.
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