Wendy's

The objective

Increasing beverage sales with traffic campaigns

Wendy's is an international, quick-service restaurant chain known for its fresh-made burgers. From December 2021 to January 2022, Wendy's New Zealand wanted to increase sales of its seasonal beverage range, Summer Sparklers, and take market share from other soft drink giants.

Summer Sparklers are not one of Wendy's core products and its market competitors employ strong brand awareness campaigns, so the brand was looking for a creative and effective approach to uplift sales. Seeing the weather play a key role in affecting customer behavior and in-store foot traffic in the past, Wendy's partnered with a local independent media agency Together, to deliver the brand's first-ever Summer Sparklers TikTok ad campaign in New Zealand, driving web traffic to the outlet locations page with a strong call-to-action.

The solution

Weather-triggering automated rules with TikTok's API for Business

Weather-triggering automated rules guided this campaign. Together built an innovative API solution for Wendy's, leveraging: 1) a third-party Weather API to obtain local weather data, and 2) TikTok's Campaign Management API to manage ad group status. This solution connects both API capabilities and sets up the triggers.

The brand prepared multiple sets of creative assets for the Summer Sparklers TikTok In-Feed Ads, with dedicated messages responding to local weather. These creative assets were added to different ad groups when the campaign was created, and the ad group status was managed by automated rules.

During the campaign flight time, the API solution monitored external weather data in Auckland, Bay of Plenty and Waikato, three major cities in New Zealand, and dictated which ad group and creative assets were activated based on the weather conditions. These conditions were designed based on customer behavior and in-store foot traffic records that were proven to uplift Wendy's product sales. For example, the In-Feed Ads featuring "cool down this summer" were activated when the weather turned sunny in these major cities, while if the weather changed or was less hot, the ad group was deactivated, and another one was served. This approach enhanced the impacts of the ad creatives and reduced needless spending in the meantime.

The results

Tangible business outcomes

Summer Sparklers sales grew by 85% year-over-year, boosted by the effectiveness of this API solution with weather rules. Wendy's aimed to double Summer Sparklers sales YoY with the campaign, and they surpassed this campaign goal by an incredible 47%, with a return of NZ$2.18 for every dollar spent.

Leveraging business-critical weather data to rigger advertising on TikTok has been a huge success. We are delighted to be the first in Asia-Pacific to do this,' said by Suraj Barnawal, Together's GM of Data, Technology and Programmable.

Not only that, but the Summer Sparklers campaign also drove repeat purchases long after the campaign period ended, and incremental sales across the entire Wendy's menu.