2024 Winner

CASE SUMMARY

In January 2023, Wendy’s introduced its new Homestyle French Toast Sticks to Canada. Unlike typical French Toast, the new menu item was made for eating on-the-go. Like that wasn’t inventive enough, the product was a bit of a departure from Wendy’s typical wheelhouse. For a challenger brand known for square burgers and bacon — and that launched a breakfast offering well after the competition — French Toast Sticks posed a unique marketing challenge to promote.

Their objectives for this campaign were attitudinal (sentiment), behavioural (visitation), and financial (sales).

Specifically, they wanted to drive positive sentiment towards Wendy’s, with specific focus on galvanizing public opinion on Wendy’s breakfast from mixed to strongly positive feelings. Move positive associations with Wendy’s from 47% to 65% share of sentiment, drive connectivity between breakfast and Wendy’s, specifically to increase morning restaurant visits (6am – 10:30am) and drive trial of Homestyle French Toast Stick and drive a 10% increase in restaurant visits.

They also wanted to create a lift in breakfast sales and increase average cheque size during campaign period, drive a 10% increase in breakfast sales through trial of new Homestyle French Toast Sticks and drive a 5% increase in average cheque.

Wendy’s Canada is a challenger brand in the Canadian fastfood marketplace, placing behind McDonald’s and a host of domestic competitors in the space. When it comes to the breakfast daypart, its presence is miniscule. Having launched breakfast years after the competition, it started on the backfoot.

Research through qualitative focus groups told us that Canadians were looking for breakfast items that didn’t require them to sit down and eat. Things that could be eaten on-the-go on their public transit or car commute were preferred. The research also uncovered a pent-up demand for sweet-and-savoury options at breakfast, something that other QSRs weren’t offering at a large scale outside of the typical donuts and muffins.

In a country where the breakfast component of fast-food is nearly entirely defined by routinized on-the-go eating, Wendy’s needed to break into Canadians commutes and make Wendy’s part of their routine.

While beloved by Canadians, French Toast isn’t something you look to your local fast-food restaurant to offer. In fact, it’s not really something you have on-the-go at all. French Toast is reserved for weekends and holidays, or those days where you have time to go through the whole process of making the sweet and savoury eggy treat. Wendy’s French Toast Sticks changes that. It makes French Toast portable — because it’s hard to beat the freedom of eating Homestyle
French Toast literally anywhere.

They just had to convince Canadians of this and show them a whole
new modality for French Toast.

So, their plan was to establish just how difficult it was to enjoy French Toast on-the-go, and then how easy it becomes with Wendy’s French Toast Sticks.

They went where no breakfast launch has gone before; the subway. Surrounded by thousands of commuters who skip breakfast every day, they pulled out all the ‘stops’. A fancy breakfast setup, complete with a table, cutlery and a mysterious man who just really likes French Toast.

French Toast isn’t something you can make quickly or easily. There’s a lot of set-up, cook time and ingredients to deal with. So, to show just how much of a hassle making French Toast is, they had the most ordinary guy they could find go and make French Toast on the subway. And then do it again. And again.

And as anticipated it didn’t take long until people noticed.

Passers-by started filming him. Wondering aloud who this man was and, crucially, why he would make French Toast on a subway. #FrenchToastGuy began trending.

WHO IS “FRENCH TOAST GUY”?
Soon the media picked up on it and started asking the same questions. Everyone loves French Toast, sure, but to make it on a subway is curious to say the least.

Just as the speculation and intrigue reached a fevered pitch, they sent French Toast Guy out one last time at the end of his French Toast filled week, but this time with Wendy’s French Toast Sticks in-hand. People continued to ask him questions — questions he answered by simply showing his love for French Toast.

They created their own “influencer” to make eating French toast on-the-go a newsworthy event. All so they could have him introduce a better way to do it: Wendy’s New French Toast Sticks. In the end, Wendy’s was revealed to be behind the whole thing — and people still ate it up.

HE’S “FRENCH TOAST STICK GUY” NOW
We didn’t just create a cult hero for the sake of it, there was a clear method to the madness of using #FrenchToastGuy to drive awareness of the Wendy’s French Toast Sticks product launch, and ultimately drive sales. And it worked.

French Toast Guy earned 25.6m impressions in the first week, reached 243m people and the Wendy’s reveal video alone scored 1.8m views on TikTok. Overall, the activation itself generated 96% positive sentiment online, with the remaining 4% probably slightly confused morning commuters. This moved Wendy’s overall brand sentiment score up from just 47% to 76%.

Social channels and mainstream media alike were lighting up with talk of French Toast Guy. Even the Toronto Transit Commission (who run the subway) put out a statement expressing their amusement: “Well he’s not waffling when it comes to his choice of breakfast foods, is he?” said senior communications advisor
for the TTC, Stuart Green.

More importantly than that, all the talk of French Toast turned into sales success as Wendy’s Breakfast Sales Grew by 30%, driven by sales of Homestyle French Toast Sticks that were 192% higher than sales forecasts. Going back to their specific objectives, the campaign performed extremely well across all three measures.

Credits

McCann Canada

Josh Stein – Chief Creative Officer
Amy O’Neill – Creative Director
Bill Schaefer – Creative Director
Menna Toeima – Art Director
Elfreda Tetteh – Copywriter
Ethan MacDonald – Copywriter
Ingrid Kroboth – Agency Producer
AJ Jones – Chief Strategy Officer
Liam Brown – Strategy Director
Kira Segal-Pillemer – Junior Strategist
Alexandra Lindsay – Account Director
Patrick O’Donovan – VP Director of Business Leadership
Philip Dos Santos – Social Community Manager


Craft

Travis Wood - Head of Content
Leen Tangney - Line Producer
Rod Reano - Camera Operator (Video Editor)
Kristina Loschiavo - Camera Operator (Producer)
Alex Tong - Camera Operator
Praven Yoganathan - Camera Operator
Andrew Vance - Camera Operator



Initiative:

Ishma Alexander-Huet - Vice President, Client Advice & Management
Raichelle Ursua - Group Account Director
Emily Johnston - Manager, Communications Design
Christina White - Supervisor, Communications Design
Shubham - Supervisor, Communications Design
Dana Tartir - Communications Designer