2022 Winner

CASE SUMMARY

As reported by the BBC, Toronto experienced the longest pandemic lockdown of any city in the world, lasting more than 360 days. As a result, every restaurant struggled, with overall category sales down 16% and a recent survey showing that over 50% of owners believed they’d be out of business by fall. With that, Good Fortune’s needed an original idea to boost delivery sales and, simply put, stay alive. As a small business with a $0 budget, paid media, influencers and PR were not options to help stand out against larger competitors. This all became even more challenging as every restaurant flooded mobile ordering apps, which themselves had become increasingly relevant in our anti-dine-out lives.

The pandemic caused millions of people to start working from home and expensing items to build their home offices. Receats was a sneaky way for people to expense their eats by disguising Good Fortune’s entire menu as office supplies on UberEats and Doordash. To bring Receats to life, they renamed every item on Good Fortune’s menu as popular office supplies. These supplies were selected to be believable in both price and purpose; burgers became Basic Steel Staplers, chicken sandwiches became Dry Erase Whiteboards etc. They then uploaded the menu to Uber Eats and DoorDash.

After disguising their food, they knew expenses would require paper trails, so they rejigged the receipt-printing process to provide customers with real receipts for their ‘office items’ from their fictional company, GF Office Supply Co. After executing their small-budget operation, they put the good news out organically on Instagram. The original idea helped Good Fortune tap into a significant cultural shift at just the right time, and in a way that people found truly relatable.

Receats quickly blew up and had over 300 articles written about it in at least 16 countries, accounting for an estimated 570m+ media impressions. The campaign also stirred endless threads of love, laughs and ethical debates on various social platforms. It received over 150k upvotes on Reddit, rising to the top of the r/funny subreddit (the second most popular subreddit of all with over 34m subscribers). It trended on LinkedIn and would end up featured on LinkedIn News. It went wild on TikTok with individual posts earning over 30k likes, and it exploded on Twitter, earning over $225,000 worth of engagement on that one platform alone. It was even used as a business case at Canada’s top business school (Ivey). And, most importantly, it drove a 34% increase in sales for the restaurant that not only caused them to survive, but thrive. The idea far exceeded planning goals with the campaign resonating tremendously, and well beyond their local demographic. Positive changes and momentum for the brand continue to this day.

Credits

CCO: Amin Todai
Creative Director/Strategy Director: Max Sawka
Writer: Sophia Wilby
Writer: Nate Houseley
Art Director: Cameron Fliegel
Designer: Dylan Belyk-Seymour
Business Lead: Patricia Tay
Project Manager: Katie Muekusch
Social Media Director: Kristina Kosa
Social Media Supervisor: Rebecca Milner
Founder, Good Fortune: Andrew Richmond
COO, Good Fortune: Jon Purdy
Social Media Coordinator: Ashley Tokaruk