There’s not a burger to be seen in Wendy’s latest campaign, but there’s beef

When Dave Thomas launched Wendy’s in 1969, he staked his restaurant’s reputation on fresh ingredients, hot burgers and thick shakes — real food, not just fast food.

The brand’s messaging, however, has not been as unwavering or as powerful as its vision. Its greatest marketing moment thus far could arguably have been during the 1984 Democratic primary debates, when Walter Mondale demanded of Gary Hart, “Where’s the beef?” In recent years, Wendy’s has struggled as its competitors dominated huge portions of the market.

“Wendy’s didn’t really have a market identity. The brand was known for good food and Dave Thomas,” says Sherri Daye Scott, editor of QSR (Quick Service Restaurant) magazine. “Its marketing campaigns since his passing [in 2002] have reflected Wendy’s search for a new identity. It’s been schizophrenic.”

That’s the challenge Saatchi & Saatchi took on when it won back the Wendy’s account in January 2007. (Companies owned by Saatchi, part of Publicis Groupe, represented the brand in the ’80s and ’90s.) Saatchi had to find a way to connect consumers with the No. 3 fast food restaurant — behind advertising innovators McDonald’s and Burger King — after a slew of forgettable campaigns left Wendy’s floundering and made its image lackluster.

Last May, Saatchi & Saatchi New York unleashed a campaign with executions and media buys that seemed to yank the venerable brand out of its torpor. Suddenly, Wendy’s was pitching to fast food’s heavy users — 25- to 34-year-olds — in realms like social networking, viral video, gaming, sports, music, cinema and reality TV.

“We had to bring the campaign to places where our consumers live in ways the Dave Thomas campaign never really got to,” says Michelle Lee, vice president and connections director at MediaVest, which handles media buying and planning for Wendy’s. 

Then there was the wig. The first video, starring a guy in a bright red pigtailed wig — modeled after the girl’s hairstyle in the chain’s logo — who rebels against the status quo and demands a “hot, juicy burger,” spawned a slew of parodies, and grabbed well over half a million views on YouTube in its first day. Consumers latched on to the weird red braids, copying the wig in Halloween costumes and using the imagery in their own videos.

Brand awareness is now up, consumers are engaging with Wendy’s online, and the red wig seems to have attained icon status. As a possible sale looms for Wendy’s, the industry is watching to see whether this campaign — which certainly has sizzle — has the staying power to make Wendy’s a powerful brand once again.

Hot and Juicy

The possibility that the campaign would stick became apparent after the success of “Kicking Trees,” the 60-second spot starring the red-wigged character that premiered during the 2007 finale of American Idol. During the day, Wendy’s purchased the home page roadblock on americanidol.com, building anticipation with forest imagery and a countdown clock. Afterward, MediaVest posted the video on YouTube, where it racked up more than 572,000 views on the first day, said Kristen Multer, associate director of MediaVest Digital.

In the first week, it was the second most-viewed video on the site and fourth on users’ list of favorites, Multer says. A newly launched brand channel on YouTube had about 200,000 viewers within the first three months, with content that ranged from commercials to commissioned artists’ videos, which also ran in movie theaters before previews, a first for Wendy’s.

Consumers quickly started posting their own videos. A clip from the movie 300 featured Vikings waving their spears and shouting, “Hot, juicy burger!” just like the character in the commercial. Home videos showed consumers holding friends on their shoulders and chanting it too.

“That made us realize that there was a specific way people were owning the campaign themselves,” says Andrew Smith, senior vice president and director of interactive at Saatchi. “That was the motivation to take the campaign where we did.”

The campaign evolved by proliferating the red wig image throughout — it was an instant identifier and significantly increased recall, Smith says — and by more explicitly inviting consumers to get involved. In stores, employees wore the wig on Halloween. Cardboard characters invited customers to pose with their own faces under a red wig; consumers took cell phone pictures and posted them online.

At the campaign’s community-building site, hotjuicyburger.com, about 36,000 users had signed up by mid-November, a month before the promotion ended, to create simple avatars and tell why they deserved a hot, juicy burger. The rules were straightforward: number of visits, time spent, votes from other users, and sharing with friends added up to points that meant free burgers; the grand prize was free burgers for life. Posting your avatar to a social networking site was worth a one-time boost in points. That turned out to be valuable for the brand too.

“The highest rate at which people who are referred to the site actually join are coming from social networking sites,” said Saatchi’s Smith. “The number of people who have embedded in an SNS is not high, but of those who have, it’s a very high influencer.”

Visitors to the site spend about three minutes on average, which Smith calls “decent.” But users who register and create an avatar sometimes spend 20 or 30 minutes, he says, and many make repeat visits.

Power to the People

A major challenge for quick-service restaurants is that consumers don’t expect much in terms of quality from any of the top three brands, yet Wendy’s actually serves fresh food, says Marnie Kain Cacossa, executive vice president and group account director at Saatchi & Saatchi New York. Hence the message throughout the campaign: Consumers deserve better, they should demand it, and they can get it at Wendy’s.

That’s consumer empowerment in “the era of Web 2.0, where the consumer makes [his] own decisions, ignores all messaging and says, ‘Screw it, I want a juicy burger,’” says Drew Neisser, CEO of Renegade Marketing Group, which did not work on the campaign. “It is the classic play of a challenger brand, taking on the leader with a ‘throw down the gauntlet’ competitive claim.”

It’s tough to compete with the Subservient Chickens and Manthems of the fast food world, Neisser says. But this campaign, in creative and strategy, “has begun to reinvent the brand, allowing Wendy’s to hone a consistent voice for the first time since Dave Thomas passed away.”

The problem is that the implication of the campaign — that the other two brands don’t sell hot, juicy burgers — isn’t exactly true, says Jeff Grill, a former group account executive with Young & Rubicam and past president of advertising agency The Romann Group.

“They have to be very clear: Tomorrow when you’re looking for a fast food place, do not go to McDonald’s, go to Wendy’s,” Grill says. “If you’re the No. 3 brand, you better figure out how to disrupt the market; otherwise, you’re always going to spend really big dollars to steal very small share.”

Grill applauds Wendy’s for reviving its valuable brand position — fresh food, not frozen — with new media, but he says the brand can do more now that it’s got the attention of its target.

“What YouTube is showing is that it’s starting to take hold,” Grill says. “They’re trying to create an ethos around the brand, and that’s not done overnight.”