My role: Social Strategist and Sr. Social Media Manager

Trolling has never tasted so good.

2x Shorty Award Winner and Webby Finalist

OBJECTIVE

For more than a decade, QDOBA has owned the queso space and has never had any major challengers. Until, Chipotle decided to throw its hat into the ring by launching a queso of its own. And the much-smaller QDOBA faced a new challenge: how was it supposed to compete against Chipotle's tortillian-dollar advertising budget?

Surprisingly, the internet threw shade about Chipotle's new queso in a not-so-positive way. When we started seeing these negative comments about Chipotle's queso, we realized QDOBA had an opportunity to be strategic in their social messaging, if they moved quickly to take advantage and ownership of the queso social chatter.

STRATEGY

While Chipotle was getting negative queso reviews, QDOBA launched #TheirWordsNotOurs, a campaign on Twitter where all the content was sourced from QDOBA fan tweets. We turned our favorite QDOBA queso-loving tweets into animated GIFs, and amplified these GIFs through a paid media strategy targeted against Chipotle consumers who mentioned queso.

But the fun didn't end there. "TheirWordsNotOurs" was also used for some savage trolling by responding to negative Chipotle queso tweets with a tongue-in-cheek QDOBA GIF reaction with a redemption coupon for QDOBA's queso.

RESULTS

QDOBA's #TheirWordsNotOurs Twitter campaign garnered more than 13.4M impressions, 3.5M media views, and over 90K engagements within the first 24 hours. Not only did our campaign have a massively positive sentiment rate, we surprised and delighted unsuspecting Chipotle Queso haters with 3,000 witty custom tweets from QDOBA, including a coupon code to redeem queso for their taste buds.

Not only did QDOBA rightfully own the queso conversation in social, they also were able to deliver a positive QDOBA queso message to Chipotle queso haters and a chance to convert these Chipotle queso haters into QDOBA queso lovers.

We sourced and leveraged UGC as key insights and brought them to life through animated GIFS.

Based on the emotion of user Tweets, we created a suite of QDOBA reaction GIFs used for trolling against Chipotle.

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Trolling has never tasted so good. Our campaign converted these Chipotle queso haters into QDOBA queso lovers.

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I leave you with a pun: I QUESO = I guess so. Mind blown.

We trolled Chipotle (again!) on National Avocado Day.

Did you hear about Chipotle’s attempt at free guacamole on National Avocado Day (7/31)? So did we—and we decided to lend free-guac-expert QDOBA’s helping hand.

Not only has QDOBA been giving free guacamole with entrées for years, they don’t need to rely on made-up holidays, promotional events, apps, and coupon codes to get the job done. Given Chipotle’s newb status, we couldn't resist giving a playful nudge.

That nudge came by way of a delivery truck loaded with 1,616 lbs. of avocados and a social media activation to get the message out. Making the rounds to multiple Denver Chipotles, we were able to troll the guac-is-extra giant on its home turf—we even paid a visit to their original flagship restaurant.

While the stunt was live for only one day, its impact lasted much longer. Not only did it generate significant buzz for the brand with over 100 million earned media impressions from BuzzFeed to CNBC and even Reddit, more importantly, the avocados were donated to the Food Bank of the Rockies and helped feed the hungry.

Watch the video and see people's reactions on social media below.