2025 Winner
SilverBest Use of Local Media
Wendy's
"Breakfast Battlegrounds"
Initiative
"Breakfast Battlegrounds"
Initiative
Breakfast has become the most hotly contested meal of the day in Canada, but five years after launching their breakfast menu, Wendy’s was trailing behind, ranked only 6th in the category. Wendy’s breakfast was experiencing a sales emergency, and stealing significant share from the competitors was our primary goal.
With only a third of the locations McDonald’s has nationwide, Canadians often passed multiple competitors before reaching a Wendy’s, creating a critical need for a localized strategy.
The agency was briefed on challenging category leaders McDonald’s and Tim Hortons, but their research revealed a different opportunity: A&W had key vulnerabilities. They share significant geographic overlap with Wendy’s, and their customers already frequent Wendy’s for lunch or dinner. Plus, A&W’s breakfast share is weaker. By converting just 5.5% of A&W’s customers to try Wendy’s breakfast once a month, they could meet their sales goal.
They mapped every A&W and Wendy’s location across Canada. Leveraging publicly available data they researched how far consumers were willing to travel for their breakfast, and merged it with the delivery distance of the most popular meal delivery apps — creating geographic battlegrounds where they could maximize impact by saturating local media.
Within these battlegrounds, the agency identified all available local media within their battlegrounds and planned out a national media domination the likes of which breakfast had never seen. They bombarded their audience across all available OOH, DOOH, display, video and social inventory targeting addressable audiences modelled after A&W breakfast switchers and geo-fenced to their battlegrounds.
Inspired by traditional grassroots election tactics, they developed a Wendy’s lawn sign promoting their breakfast superiority and spread these on roadsides and medians throughout key neighborhoods — turning local streets into a Wendy’s media takeover zone. Effectively turning the tide so consumers now had to pass roughly five Wendy’s touchpoints on their way to an A&W.
Using a combination of proprietary point-of-interest data and publicly available delivery radius data, they created hyper-local battleground zones for targeted media activation — a new approach in breakfast marketing.
The lawn sign campaign was a novel local activation that physically reclaimed consumer routes, enhancing the media message with high local visibility.
Sales surpassed targets by 127% and Wendy’s breakfast sales reached an all-time high during the campaign Breakfast window with visits rising by more 36% overall during the campaign. The rest of the day visits rose by more than 25% overall, showing that the breakfast push had halo effects.
Visits remained high 4 weeks post-campaign (by more than 23% breakfast and more than 29% rest of day).
The campaign garnered more than 19,434,128 total campaign impressions (60% more than planned), aided awareness of Wendy’s breakfast reached an all-time high (69%), garnered 52,119 total clicks (67.2% more than planned), 347,188 social engagements (2.85% engagement rate), and 340 lawn signs were distributed over 2 days.
With only a third of the locations McDonald’s has nationwide, Canadians often passed multiple competitors before reaching a Wendy’s, creating a critical need for a localized strategy.
The agency was briefed on challenging category leaders McDonald’s and Tim Hortons, but their research revealed a different opportunity: A&W had key vulnerabilities. They share significant geographic overlap with Wendy’s, and their customers already frequent Wendy’s for lunch or dinner. Plus, A&W’s breakfast share is weaker. By converting just 5.5% of A&W’s customers to try Wendy’s breakfast once a month, they could meet their sales goal.
They mapped every A&W and Wendy’s location across Canada. Leveraging publicly available data they researched how far consumers were willing to travel for their breakfast, and merged it with the delivery distance of the most popular meal delivery apps — creating geographic battlegrounds where they could maximize impact by saturating local media.
Within these battlegrounds, the agency identified all available local media within their battlegrounds and planned out a national media domination the likes of which breakfast had never seen. They bombarded their audience across all available OOH, DOOH, display, video and social inventory targeting addressable audiences modelled after A&W breakfast switchers and geo-fenced to their battlegrounds.
Inspired by traditional grassroots election tactics, they developed a Wendy’s lawn sign promoting their breakfast superiority and spread these on roadsides and medians throughout key neighborhoods — turning local streets into a Wendy’s media takeover zone. Effectively turning the tide so consumers now had to pass roughly five Wendy’s touchpoints on their way to an A&W.
Using a combination of proprietary point-of-interest data and publicly available delivery radius data, they created hyper-local battleground zones for targeted media activation — a new approach in breakfast marketing.
The lawn sign campaign was a novel local activation that physically reclaimed consumer routes, enhancing the media message with high local visibility.
Sales surpassed targets by 127% and Wendy’s breakfast sales reached an all-time high during the campaign Breakfast window with visits rising by more 36% overall during the campaign. The rest of the day visits rose by more than 25% overall, showing that the breakfast push had halo effects.
Visits remained high 4 weeks post-campaign (by more than 23% breakfast and more than 29% rest of day).
The campaign garnered more than 19,434,128 total campaign impressions (60% more than planned), aided awareness of Wendy’s breakfast reached an all-time high (69%), garnered 52,119 total clicks (67.2% more than planned), 347,188 social engagements (2.85% engagement rate), and 340 lawn signs were distributed over 2 days.
Credits
Wendy’s (Client)Wendy’s Restaurants of Canada
Initiative Canada (Media)
Ishma Alexander-Huet - Chief Design Officer
Raichelle Ursua - Group Account Director
Amanda Frail - Manager, Communications Design
Jeongeun Kim - Sr. Communications Designer
Austin Tenhunen - Director, Strategy
Stefan Ruby - Director, Creative Partnerships
Ryan Van Dongen - EVP, Head of Communications Design & Gaming
Chris Gairdner - VP, Head of Creative Partnerships
Sammy Rifai - Chief Strategy Officer
Taylor Schmidt - Director, Creative Partnerships
Helen Galanis - Chief Executive Officer
McCann
Bill Schaefer - Creative Director
Bryan Howarth - Art Director
Matt Doran - Copywriter
Stef Fabich - Producer
Brian Bentley-Falcke - Business Lead
Valentina Acevedo - Account Supervisor