BACKGROUND - Delimex has been around for nearly forty years, but despite being the perfect food to fuel hardcore gaming sessions, our taquitos weren’t on gamers’ radar. We knew if we didn’t introduce our product authentically, they’d instantly reject the brand. But, how do you tell gamers about your product when they never look away from their screens? You meet face-to-face on their own turf. Our insight stems from a common gamer term: FEEDING, the act of dying repeatedly, serving the enemy team easy wins.
IDEA - We flipped the frustrations players feel when their team is feeding on its head and used gamers’ own lingo to create an unexpected and authentic in-game activation. Without an official partnership, our Delimex team hacked the year’s biggest online games by feeding gamers free points and taquitos across three days, helping them level up faster in-game and stay fed and focused outside of it.
With a budget of only $60K USD, we couldn’t afford to partner directly with the year’s biggest online games, so we hacked the way the games are played instead. With a combined player base of over 160 million players, we met gamers in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Warzone 2.0, and Overwatch 2. We chose the Mexican special forces character, wore custom skins in the Delimex colors, and named our characters Delimex and Taquito. Then we hung out at in-game food spots like taco trucks and kitchens, repeatedly sacrificing ourselves to players. Then we sent them free taquito coupons so they could feed on Delimex in real life too.
We engaged with gamers in their favorite games in a way they’d never experienced before. While they see branded items appear at in-game shops every day, they’d never run into a real in-game street team of actual gamers helping them level up in a match, then send them free products to keep them fueled. Rather than paying our way into their favorite games, we played our way into them, delivering a truly unique experience to gamers.
Top Twitch streamers joined the feast, showing gamers where to find us in-game. Gamers loved it, cheering us on in Twitch chat and then ran with our idea, showing us how they fed on the enemy themselves, posting their clips to Reddit and Discord, gaming’s biggest communities. After feeding gamers free points and thousands and thousands of samples face-to-face in their favorite games, we proved that victory tastes like taquitos.
On a tight budget, we found a unique and authentic way to speak to gamers without feeding them another sponsored cash-grab in their favorite games. Feeding Gamers reached over 40 million players, putting Delimex taquitos on their radar as the perfect food to fuel their hardcore gaming sessions. Over three days we fed them 11 500 taquitos in real life, leaving them stronger in-game and fueled and focused in real life. With 653 779 influencer engagements, not only did they love it, but they were engaged both inside and outside the games. During the activation, we saw a 905% increase to our social media traffic with engagement doubling. Feeding Gamers was a huge success for Delimex meeting and exceeding objectives across the board.
