Most brand campaigns start in a meeting. This one started with a teenager and a joke.
The question
On April 6, 2017, Carter Wilkerson, a 16-year-old from Reno, Nevada, tweeted at Wendy’s with a simple question: how many retweets would he need to get free chicken nuggets for a year?
Wendy’s replied with a number: 18 million.
It was an obviously impossible target. At the time, the most retweeted tweet in history, Ellen DeGeneres’s star-studded selfie from the Oscars, had been retweeted 3,430,249 times, according to Guinness. Wendy’s was playing along with a joke it assumed would go nowhere.
“A man needs his nuggs”
Wilkerson took a screenshot of the exchange and posted it with a plea for help: “HELP ME PLEASE. A MAN NEEDS HIS NUGGS.”
The internet took up his cause. The hashtag #NuggsForCarter spread across Twitter, and brands, celebrities and strangers joined in. Wilkerson’s quest became a running news story, a small, harmless underdog campaign that people enjoyed being part of.
Breaking the record
On May 9, 2017, according to Guinness World Records, Wilkerson’s tweet became the most retweeted tweet of all time, overtaking DeGeneres’s Oscar selfie, which Guinness said had 3,430,249 retweets that day. By then Wilkerson’s tweet had been shared more than 3,470,000 times.
It was nowhere near 18 million. Wendy’s gave him the free nuggets for a year anyway.
Wilkerson also started a website selling #NuggsForCarter T-shirts, with proceeds going to the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, the charity founded by Wendy’s founder. Wendy’s pledged $100,000 to the same foundation.
Why it worked for Wendy’s
- Wendy’s said yes to the joke. A number, even an absurd one, gave the public a goal to chase. A polite “sorry, we can’t” would have ended it.
- The customer was the hero. People weren’t sharing a Wendy’s ad; they were helping a teenager win nuggets. That made it far easier to join in.
- The stakes were tiny. A year of nuggets costs a chain almost nothing, which made it easy for Wendy’s to be generous at the end.
- It ended with generosity. Giving the nuggets anyway, and adding a charity donation, turned a joke into a feel-good story.
- It fit the brand’s voice. Wendy’s had built a playful, witty social media personality, and this was that personality working at scale.
Legacy
#NuggsForCarter held the retweet record until later posts, including one by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, passed it. It remains one of the best examples of “reactive” social marketing: a brand noticing a customer’s moment and joining in rather than trying to own it. It is also a reminder that some of the most effective campaigns are the ones a brand never planned.