When customers walk into a Panera Bread cafe, most will choose to order an old favorite off the menu, like broccoli cheddar soup, or the bacon turkey bravo sandwich. These “favorites” are what bring customers back again and again. For the Panera Favorites campaign, the brand asked customers to champion their favorite menu item for a chance to win it free for a year.
On a dedicated landing page and across social and CRM channels, customers were asked to vote for their favorite menu item and share their love by writing a custom ode with the Panera Odecrafter. Leveraging the wood-cut stage look and feel from the brand’s “Live Consciously, East Deliciously” campaign, we built a customized experience that allowed customers to create and customize their own video ode. They could personalize their own wood-cut avatar, select scenes depicted in their ode, and then write it by filling out a funny, MadLibs-style series of fill-in-the-blanks. I worked closely with our copy, animator and and development teams to design the experience based on the different scenario combinations. The final output was a fun, animation-style video set to music that could be shared across Facebook and Twitter.
In 6 weeks, there were over 2 million unique site visits to the landing page experience and over 400,000 votes placed. Over 79,000 people created odes, sharing over 3,500 times.