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The Cheesecake Factory
Senior Copywriter + Senior Social Lead
Creative Strategy
Tone & Voice Strategy
Reactive Content Strategy
Brand Strategy
Experiential Strategy
Copywriting
Paid Social
Organic Concepts
Global + Domestic 360°
Holiday Campaigns
Editorial Management
Content Calendar Strategy
Editorial Forecasting
CM Team Management
What's Basque
You Ask?
Welcome to National Cheesecake Day 2023
Each year The Cheesecake Factory celebrates the best day of the year — National Cheesecake Day — by releasing a new flavor of cheesecake. But what happens when the flavor joining a luscious line-up is a widely unknown, completely different style of cheesecake from overseas? The introduction of the intriguingly unfamiliar Classic Basque Cheesecake, a crustless cheesecake hailing from Spain, gave us a unique opportunity to celebrate National Cheesecake Day in a fresh new way.
Just as Pixar's successful release of "Ratatouille" required some extra marketing magic to acquaint audiences with an unfamiliar word, we took a similar edu-tainment approach to introduce Basque Cheesecake. Through a strategic series of organic and paid teasers, sneak previews, and a full-fledged trailer, our task was to turn Basque into CCF's newest blockbuster hit by treating this foreign-born flavor as an international man of mystery. After rebranding #NationalCheesecakeDay to #NationalCheesecakeMonth, we embarked on an informative and entertaining month-long campaign to build awareness — and momentum — leading up to Basque's July 30th premiere date.
Our "pre-launch" phase was about creating intrigue around the highly anticipated flavor of the year announcement. After a week of stoking excitement with teaser content, we resolved the cliffhanger by releasing the filled-in version of the photo of Basque and the flavor's phonetic spelling.
To celebrate our fleet of iconic desserts, we spotlighted all 15 specialty flavors released on #NationalCheesecakeDays past. These spotlights, which spanned a variety of creative executions, were timed strategically to coincide with relevant events of the month – such as featuring S'mores Cheesecake on the Fourth of July. To keep a spotlight on our star, we ran a concurrent educational campaign aimed at answering the question on everyone's mind — 'what's Basque, you ask?' — that detailed the historical background of the traditional dish and mouth-watering sensory details.
A few days before premiere day, it became time for an awareness and hype blitz. What's any good movie campaign without a trailer? Paying homage to international spy movies, we created a custom trailer for Basque with all of the blockbuster bells and whistles: a deep-voiced narrator, explosions, and even a rating card (Rated "D" for Delicious).
The Basque Cheesecake announcement wasn't the only sweet way to celebrate the holiday. For every slice sold on premiere day, Cheesecake donated $1 of the purchase to Feeding America, the nation's largest organization dedicated to fighting domestic hunger through a network of food banks.
Throughout the campaign, our content generated 12.85M impressions, 223.67K engagements, 183.97K likes, 9.5K comments, 12.31K saves, and 368.3K video views. Because sentiment was so positive from fans across the social ecosystem about our trailer, our client chose to run it on the screens above the mecca of Cheesecake, the bakery case, in every single Cheesecake Factory location nationwide. For context, there are 243 brick-and-mortar locations nationally that average 1,100 guests per day—equaling an additional 267K daily impressions.
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