Pickle Quest

Objective

Challenge & Opportunity

The QSR landscape has reached a point of strategic saturation, where brands compete for the same broad audiences using the same exhausted third-party demographic data. When Popeyes launched its niche, flavor-first "All-Pickle Menu," we faced a critical challenge: how do you cut through the noise of constant QSR menu launches to reach genuine pickle enthusiasts?

We recognised an interactive opportunity: the metaverse isn't just a new advertising channel, it's a space where consumer identity is expressed through virtual wearables (skins, avatars, cosmetics). We needed to create an interactive, virtual world experience that would leverage this technology to identify, engage, and reward our target audience while driving real-world business results.

Strategy: Leveraging Metaverse Technology

We looked to Fortnite, a culture-defining metaverse platform. In February 2025, Fortnite released "Big Dill," a giant playable pickle skin (wearable). We recognised that in metaverse culture, skins aren't just cosmetic choices; they're expressions of identity and affinity.

Our creative insight: Players who chose to wear the Big Dill skin were self-identifying as pickle lovers through their virtual wearable choice. We became the first brand to treat in-game character selection (wearable) as a targeting data point, allowing us to design an interactive, virtual world experience specifically for a highly engaged, pickle-loving audience.

Strategy

Execution: The Virtual World Experience

We partnered with GoodGamers to build a fully immersive 1:1 replica of a Popeyes restaurant inside Murder Mystery, one of Fortnite's most-trafficked islands with millions of existing players.

Environmental Storytelling: The restaurant walls featured cryptic riddles ("Pickles get pickles", etc.) that invited players to investigate and decode, creating an interactive virtual space that rewarded exploration.
Wearable-Gated Experience: Players wearing the Big Dill skin could fully participate in the quest, leveraging metaverse wearables as a qualification mechanism.
Community Collaboration: Intrigue sparked organic discussion across social platforms, turning individual discovery into collective problem-solving within the virtual world.
Reward Integration: Players wearing the Big Dill skin who visited and shared proof on X were rewarded with an item from the new Pickle Menu, redeemable IRL, bridging virtual environments and physical commerce.

Authentic Integration: By building within an existing, high-traffic island, we ensured the experience felt like a natural part of the Fortnite ecosystem, not an intrusion.

Results

Impact

In just four days, we demonstrated the transformative potential of interactive metaverse environments:

Immersive Engagement: 720,851 players spent 617,000+ minutes exploring the virtual Popeyes.
Wearable-Driven Precision: Successfully identified and engaged a niche audience through their choice of virtual wearable (Big Dill skin), proving that metaverse technology can drive precision targeting.
Community-Driven Scale: 17.1 million+ in-game engagements as players participated in the quest and shared their discoveries.
Virtual-to-Physical Bridge: Successfully created a seamless metaverse experience that honoured virtual world culture while driving real-world business results.

Industry First: We proved that the future of targeting lies in creatively leveraging unique behavioral signals that already exist in interactive digital environments. By treating in-game character selection as a unique data point, we unlocked a specific audience based on their real pickle passion.