Eleven-year-old Elliot Srikantia is the perfect example of what Carl's Jr. aimed to achieve with its recent viral "How I Eat a Burger" campaign. Srikantia is a fan of one of the YouTube stars the company asked to promote the chain's new Portobello Mushroom Six Dollar Burger. But the Shaker Heights, Ohio, resident had never eaten at a Carl's Jr.
Then, he visited family in Oakland, Calif., last month and repeatedly asked to visit Carl's Jr. to taste the burger. For Srikantia, the chance to try the sandwich was the highlight of his trip to California.
For Carl's Jr., the YouTube partnership met its mark, with more than 6 million online views of the videos and one of the chain's most successful burger launches.
As a regional chain, the company is continually looking for fresh ways to target its young, hungry guy demographic on a limited marketing budget. The brand is known for its sexy television ads and has more recently created buzz for its edgy work online, where the 18-34 age group spends more of its time.
The brand's latest effort drew on the online viewing power of nine YouTube video creators, or vloggers, in a campaign developed by the innovations group for the chain's media agency Initiative.
Ezra Cooperstein, Initiative's vice president and director of the innovations group, said the agency was pretty confident it could leverage the video creators' combined total of 3.8 million YouTube subscribers to draw attention to the burger as well as the brand's new YouTube channel.
"We decided this was a really interesting advertising opportunity for a brand that was looking to have some immediate buzz around a product launch," Cooperstein said.
The innovations group worked with You Tube and parent company Google to choose nine of the top 20 video creators, known as key influencers in social media. The vloggers were paid an undisclosed flat fee and asked to create a video on the topic "How I eat a burger" and specifically mention the Portobello Mushroom burger.
All the videos launched simultaneously on each of the vlogger's sites. Carl's Jr. also launched its new YouTube channel at the same time, redirecting each of the videos to the brand's channel.
Two of the videos received more than 1 million views each, including comedy group NigaHiga's "The Portobello Mushroom Burger," which topped Visible Measures' weekly Viral Video Chart in its first week.
Carl's Jr. is pleased with the results. Brad Haley, executive vice president of marketing for the company, said the number of views exceeded expectations.
"To put it in perspective, if we run television ads (for sister chain Hardee's) in a St. Louis Cardinal's game, which is very highly rated in the St. Louis area, we might reach 1 million people," Haley said.
Such an ad also is costly, not only for the media time during such a popular broadcast, but also for the cost of production.
"Here, we got 6 million views with virtually no media cost per se," he said.
Interactive component
Cooperstein said his group was pleased with the campaign for the number views as well as how it drew attention to the brand's YouTube channel. For example, redirecting the viewers to the channel boosted views of the Portobello Burger's "Last Bite" 30-second TV spot to more than 350,000.
"When you're redirecting them to that new brand channel, you're really creating a place where people are now conditioned to engage with the brand," he said.
And engagement is the ultimate goal of an online campaign, with fans commenting on videos and making them viral by passing them on to friends.
"In the online space, the consumer asks for so much more, and the medium provides the opportunity for so much more (than a TV ad). It's not solely a lean-back environment," Cooperstein said, referring to the passive TV viewer. "(Online), it's a lean-forward environment, so there's real opportunity for the brand to create something that furthers the experience."
Some observers of the digital world, however, question whether the campaign was indeed a viral success. Sebastian Engelhardt, author of the Compulsive Notes-Taker blog, said the campaign did create buzz but mostly within each vlogger's built-in audience. The videos were not passed around the Internet as viral videos are, but watched by the vloggers' regular YouTube audience.
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Although some bloggers have criticized the campaign for its commercializing of the YouTube stars, Engelhardt said the simultaneous release of the videos along with the product launch was a good idea.
"This is what drew attention to this campaign," he said, noting that YouTube first introduced its partnership program in 2007. "In-video commercials are just the next evolutionary step in online video advertising.
Digital component
Carl's Jr. relies on digital media as a component of all of its marketing campaigns, including its new "Hot Chicks Eating Burgers" program. That campaign is soliciting videos from women demonstrating how they eat a burger. The videos will be shown on the brand's YouTube channel, and a contest will allow consumers to pick their favorite.
Haley said that online advertising — from banner ads to microsites — helps the regional brand compete with the national chains.
"It does level the playing field somewhat because the digital realm isn't so expensive to play in as the traditional media world," he said. "In traditional media, our competitors may spend four to five times as much as we do."
Cooperstein said Carl's Jr. succeeds in the digital space because the brand understands its target demographic and has a high risk tolerance as a result.
"They're not McDonald's, they're not Burger King," he said. "They're a QSR that serves premium burgers that really understands the psychographics of its target audience."
That understanding and its willingness to do what it takes to reach its audience "will pay huge dividends as (the brand) continues to take leaps forward in these new, uncharted territories," Cooperstein said. But the brand's targeted focus on its own product is the true key to its success.
"Ultimately every spot they do, it really does a good job of highlighting the food. No matter what, the food is always the star of everything they do," he said. "That premium, big, juicy, really strong positioning is very consistent with their messaging and who their target audience is and what they're looking for."
