El Pollo Loco

The objective

Spicing up dining and community engagement with El Pollo Loco's limited-time birria delights

El Pollo Loco is a regional Mexican-style restaurant chain that celebrates Hispanic culture and people. Seizing on the culinary hype in 2022 around birria flavors, El Pollo Loco sought to reach its multicultural audience by promoting a limited-time menu item, Shredded Beef Birria, through a fusion of organic and paid media.

While El Pollo Loco runs campaigns on other channels, TikTok is its go-to platform for campaign prioritization and innovative creative strategies. By leveraging the power of TikTok ad products and collaborating with creators, El Pollo Loco crafted an unforgettable brand moment that lasted long after the campaign ended.

The solution

Cooking up excitement with TikTok creators

El Pollo Loco ran awareness and engagement-focused campaigns that leveraged TikTok's community of creators. The brand enlisted ten diverse creators through a TikTok Marketing Partner, Influential, to try the Shredded Beef Birria menu items and share their experiences using the hashtag #DipNDrip. The videos featured authentic, entertaining content from the selected creators, each using their unique tone of voice and style. El Pollo Loco's Shredded Beef Birria was also packaged in an eye-catching box, further encouraging TikTok users to try it and film their own unboxing videos.

Utilizing TikTok's auction advertising platform, El Pollo Loco boosted the creator videos as Spark Ads focused on Community Interaction and Video Views objectives. Spark Ads are a type of In-Feed Ad that allows brands to boost organic TikTok posts as ads, maximizing awareness and amplifying reach. Implementing a multi-objective approach enabled the brand to target key audiences using a mid-funnel strategy that optimized its ads toward users likely to watch longer, like, and follow the brand.

To ensure the appropriate target audience, El Pollo Loco leveraged TikTok's location targeting option, Designated Market Area (DMA) geo-targeting, so that the ads reached users in cities with El Pollo Loco restaurants. El Pollo Loco also targeted users aged 18-54 who were also enthusiasts of food and casual dining to reach and garner a wide variety of ages while still keeping Millennials and Gen Z top of mind.

The results

Savoring the success

El Pollo Loco's dynamic #DipNDrip campaign, fueled by TikTok geo-targeting, Spark Ads, and culinary creators, ignited a dining frenzy and soared as the brand's most successful limited-time offer in four decades. The community-driven strategy amassed over 16.4 million video views and produced an 8.5% lift in overall sales. Furthermore, the multi-objective campaign served up 17.5 million impressions across all ad groups. The campaign's blend of interactivity and entertainment left users hungry for more, achieving a 6-second view-through rate (VTR) of 33.49%, surpassing TikTok's dining vertical VTR benchmark.

Inspired by the success of the 2022 campaign, El Pollo Loco brought back Shredded Beef Birria for a limited time in 2023. The brand is leveraging TikTok Brand Lift and Foursquare studies for a second birria campaign to enable more effective measurement of incrementality and TikTok's influence on total sales lift during promotions. In addition to the birria campaign, El Pollo Loco has activated more key moments on TikTok, including the Abuela Approved and Día de los Muertos campaigns, embracing multicultural holidays with excitement and authenticity.