Red Robin Gourmet Burgers is a 40-year old chain of restaurants devoted to great food and family fun.  Well established on the West Coast, Red Robin is expanding quickly eastward and needed a cost effective way to build brand awareness, combat casual dining category sales declines and increase their opt-in email database. 

How did we do that? Run Red Robin’s first national advertising campaign using Cable with digital to drive results. This would allow us to build immediate broad based awareness in a cost effective manner to the busy lifestyle segments of families and young adults. We didn’t have a big budget so we needed to be creative with how we developed our plan.  Consumer insight, integration, negotiation and promotion lead to some impressive results!

Product integration in Bravo’s program Top Chef in their Quick Fire Challenge segment.  RR’s menu was featured and chefs designed their own gourmet burgers.  As a further extension, Red Robin ran banner ads in the Top Chef section of Bravo’s website. 

Use of TBS’ Movie and a Makeover and USA’s Character Fantasy as platforms to drive entries for RR’s Kids Burger Recipe contest by featuring last years’ winner and directing people to www.redrobin.com.   In addition, banner ads on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network’s websites drove people to the Red Robin site to enter.

Empower concepted, designed and created an online promotional game, the Deal-Liciousness Instant Win Game, whereby people could win RR gift cards and join the e-club email database.

This game of chance generated over 90,000 game plays over a three month period.