For Halloween 2024, Dunkin' had an ambitious goal of making this Halloween their best-selling year ever for their spider donut. The specialty donut was a Halloween seasonal product that had a cult following amongst Dunkin' super fans, but didn't have widespread awareness amongst casual Dunkin' fans or light QSR breakfast buyers.
With extremely limited budget and no above-the-line support for the product, Dunkin' tasked the Cornelia Creative team with developing a strategy to drive awareness and sales of their limited-time offering, using organic social as our only lever.
Through analysis of our social posts, we had learned that the more absurd, unexpected, or comedic that the content was, the better it tended to perform. The spider donut represented a chance for us to take a risk and lean all the way in to this absurdity, so our creative concept was to bring the spider donut to life through a character named "Spidey D."
This character's key personality trait was its unruly and chaotic tone of voice - leaving followers with no idea what Spidey might say next. Spidey D's main mission was to be an agent of chaos, so his first move was to "hijack" all of Dunkin's social accounts, announcing his presence, updating the bio and image information, and starting to blast out wild content. We posted multiple times a day on each platform, using Spidey's unhinged personality to create hilarious memes and short-form video concepts that very quickly gathered attention. This content had messaging like:
These posts provided incredible engagement and shareability, and quickly started to get pick up from major news outlets and other meme accounts. One of the highlights and most engaging parts of the campaign was the comment section, where we had multiple community managers responding to every comment in Spidey D's ridiculous tone of voice - which featured plenty of insults and absolutely no understanding of spelling or grammar. Creators were going viral on TikTok just reading through dozens of our responses to followers and brands on our posts.
To make the experience even more engaging, Spidey was pushing out new content in real-time - creating new organic content out of comments, going into the comments section of spider videos and other meme accounts, and reposting consumers who went to go pick up the spider donut in store. We were also able to quickly launch Spidey D sweatshirts with some of our favorite memes, which sold out within an hour.
As we got closer to November 1st and the end of Spooky Season, we knew we needed a way to get rid of the internet's newest beloved celebrity. We let Spidey's last chaotic move to be him "leaking" Dunkin's holiday menu, which became the most liked product launch in Dunkin's history. Spidey was then "killed off" through an ominous video and "press release" from Dunkin' that stated that his behavior and leaking of the menu was unacceptable, but with a hidden message of "SPIDEY FOREVER" within the post. To our delight, our followers were quick to point this out. We made sure to leave the door open for a potential return of Spidey in 2025, which Dunkin' followers remind us of...every. single. day.
The campaign resulted in an incredible earned media success for Dunkin'. In just one week, Spidey D posted 28 times across all social channels, delivering on Dunkin' social:
In addition to our 28 posts, we also commented over 1,000 times as Spidey D across social, responding to followers and proactively engaging with other accounts.
This campaign also got incredible pick-up from influencers, PR, and TV, generating an additional 2.9 billion earned impressions from articles on the Wall Street Journal, the Today Show, USA Today, Complex, the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and many more.
Ultimately, the results was the best selling year ever for Dunkin's spider donut, and on top of all that, this campaign was executed with zero dollars in paid media and a production budget of less than $5,000.
