Through-the-line Campaign | CSI Drive | Purpose-led Awareness Marketing
For 6 years, Wimpy has been a proud supporter of Slipper Day: Reach For A Dream’s largest annual fundraising campaign. In 2020, due to lockdown restrictions, Slipper day was cancelled. This meant that many children fighting life-threatening illnesses had their dreams put on hold.
During the pandemic, normal restaurant operations were restricted and the economy was at an all-time low, meaning that most South Africans experienced financial difficulties. All of Reach For A Dream’s Slipper Day partners chose not to support this initiative during this time and even Wimpy, who had to close all of its restaurants for the majority of lockdown, considered pulling out.
We realised the importance of being a purpose-led brand, especially during a pandemic, and the importance of the work that Reach For A Dream was doing. They give hope to those who need it the most. We wanted to play our part in making a difference, so we took on the challenge to create a Wimpy campaign that would support Reach For A Dream, in the midst of a global pandemic, asking consumers to donate money during an unprecedented economic disaster – all while working with an exceptionally tight budget.
We filmed one digital video piece, which was structured in a way that would allow us to cut it up and reuse what we needed when speaking to a variety of occasions (takeaway, road trip, and promotion). We also needed to bring in some of that iconic Wimpy humour when talking to parents. To achieve this we decided to feature a trending nature icon, Sir David Attenborough… or at least someone who could be his double. With this one central piece of creative, we built an entire integrated, seamless user journey around the consumer to ensure that all content added value to their journey and always kept them in the Wimpy ecosystem, both physically and digitally.
All of our content was housed on a dedicated landing page on our website, which became the end-goal of our user journey. This map page turned out to be so successful that it’s now an evergreen piece of content that we constantly update with interesting road-trip content.
…and drove the message that ‘Dreams Can’t be Locked Down’. We also reached out to agency partners (for both Wimpy and Reach For A Dream), to create a through-the-line campaign to drive awareness and engagement from the widest possible audience.
We launched the campaign on social media and digital platforms with TV and radio partnerships becoming available through contacts with Reach For A Dream. On social, we introduced our audience to the children by telling their stories and then used TVC, radio, and OOH billboards to drive people to interact with us online. We also updated all of Wimpy’s 467 restaurant webpages with Slipper Week content and all of our creative had a strong call to action that drove people to the donation page on the Wimpy website. We even had celebrity influencers who shared our content and showed off their ‘Slipper Selfies’ to lend their support for this cause; this helped to drive exposure and reach.
In just two weeks, and despite the challenges we were facing, we managed to make
Most importantly, we proved that