Dunkin’ Donuts leveraged its partnership with ESPN’s Monday Night Footballand the emerging social platform Vine to create “#DunkinReplay,” a campaign designed to engage younger consumers by combining live TV with mobile social sharing. Each Monday night, the brand created a “Dunkin’-ized” replay of the game’s marquee play and shared it on Twitter to create significant social buzz.
Objective and Context:
For years, Dunkin’ Donuts had the coffee and breakfast QSR category cornered. However, recently, brands like McDonald’s and Starbucks have begun to vie for a share of that market. With the recent economic recession still fresh in consumers’ minds, fewer folks were taking part in the daily ritual of coffee and breakfast out of the house, and advances in home coffee brewing helped this trend progress further. Also, Dunkin’ found itself lagging behind its primary competition in terms of social media presence, which was problematic considering the increased impact of social recommendations on purchasing decisions. Sixty percent of Americans mention a food and dining brand at least once every day in their conversations with others, and McDonald’s and Starbucks were both in the “Top 10 of Most Talked-About Food and Dining Brands.” (Keller-Fay) Furthermore, Starbucks had long been pursuing an engaged digital consumer through a successful loyalty program and mobile payment system. Their social efforts spoke directly to the engaged and mobile consumer, a prime audience target for Dunkin’ Donuts.
Target Audience:
The brand needed to connect with a younger audience whose media consumption was fragmented, engage consumers in a way that encouraged store visitation, and most importantly, drive sales. The solution came in the form of #DunkinReplay, a campaign that leveraged the existing consumer behavior of TV consumption with mobile devices in hand. As part of its Monday Night Countdown sponsorship, Dunkin’ Donuts created real-time messaging using the emerging mobile and social platform Vine. With #DunkinReplay, each week a marquee play from Monday Night Football was recreated in Vine featuring Dunkin’ products, and then amplified via Twitter.
Creative Strategy:
According to research from the NPD Group, 87 percent of U.S. consumers use a second-screen device while watching TV. Nielsen’s SocialGuide reported that almost half of all the activity on Twitter is generated from live televised sports. Dunkin’ leveraged both of these insights to create content that fit in the context of Monday Night Football and was designed for mobile-first consumption. Given that the campaign was about the consumer’s mobile behavior, the brand focused most if not all of its budget for the program on mobile efforts.
Avoiding the huge investment that comes with national branding efforts, Dunkin’ looked toward social media for a buzzworthy second-screen TV experience. As an early adopter of Vine, the brand was positioned to create a social and mobile consumer experience. Vine’s status as a reliable source of mobile-first, real-time, and lightweight content was an ideal fit for a lighthearted brand like Dunkin’.
Overall Campaign Execution:
Each week, the #DunkinReplay Vine videos were shared on the brand’s Twitter feed and via promoted tweets targeted at NFL fans. During the ESPN pre-game show Monday Night Countdown, Dunkin’ aired a teaser Vine driving viewers to the dedicated hashtag #DunkinReplay.
Mobile Execution:
A newsroom-style team watched the Monday night game and selected a play during halftime to be recreated as a Vine and animated via stop-motion on a 10-foot “Dunkin-ized” set. The six-second video was then tweeted during the fourth quarter by both Dunkin’ and ESPN. The campaign inserted Dunkin’ directly into the NFL conversation that was happening in real time via mobile devices.
#DunkinReplay leveraged mobile in a way that was native to the consumer experience surrounding Monday Night Football. The campaign was a cross-screen, 360-degree marketing experience that linked the consumer from TV to mobile and then back to TV, and introduced the first-ever Vine-produced TV commercial. The on-air elements of the ESPN sponsorship delivered an estimated $836,000 in additional media value and helped promote the Vine videos. Altogether the #DunkinReplay Vines garnered more than 70.7 million impressions, and the tweets sharing the videos had an engagement rate 8 to 10 percent higher than Twitter’s average.
