Gaming is a cornerstone passion point for the GenZ Doritos target. The place to be? Fortnite. The game has risen to the top of popularity charts for this audience, with over 350 million users, creating refreshed opportunities for players and brands to bring new and improved experiences to this audience.
After the very successful launch of Doritos Triangle Island within Fortnite in 2022, the brand aimed to build upon the experience, continuing to cement a place of relevance and share-of-mind with gamers. The objective was to integrate Doritos' biggest product launch of the year, Doritos Sweet & Tangy BBQ, and turn it into a highly anticipated update to an established, massive touchpoint as if it were our own gaming franchise. Despite limitations of the platform’s partnership rules and not a high budget for in-game integrations, Doritos aimed to exceed last year’s benchmarks in both retention and playtime.
The Gen Z & Millennial gaming audience is hard-to-reach when it comes to traditional marketing. They are the cord-cutting generation, with fewer tuning into ad-heavy moments like the Super Bowl.
In 2022, Doritos found an authentic way to reach gamers with Triangle Island, a branded in-game destination in Fortnite, with mini games drawing inspiration from Doritos flavors.
Building on the success of that first-year integration, we chose to come back for more. For the launch of our new flavor, Doritos Sweet & Tangy BBQ, we delivered by bringing an entire Doritos-branded superstore to Triangle Island, called Doritos Mart. The game was a fully Doritos-branded Prop Hunt, a popular "hide-and-seek" game mode in Fortnite. Gamers could enter the store map, hide as unique props inspired by Doritos flavors, get a bite inside Sweet & Tangy’s BBQ Restaurant, and then shop ‘til their team dropped.
To amplify the launch of the new game mode, we brought the Doritos Mart to life at the largest gaming convention in the U.S., TwitchCon 2024 in Las Vegas. Convention-goers could physically enter the mart, play the new game mode on fully-loaded PCs, take selfies in our photo op, and find the hidden props IRL to win prizes and take home a bag of BBQ Doritos.
To boost awareness of the new game, we also leveraged the talent and reach of gaming legend TimTheTatMan, who encouraged his 100,000 viewers to drop in and play with him. His stream viewers also had the opportunity to win an ultimate Doritos Prize Pack containing BBQ-themed branded merch.
In the end, Doritos Mart proved to be another smash hit, obliterating the retention rate of the first iteration by over 7x and the average playtime by 50%. Doritos was able to authentically show up for the gaming audience, introducing refreshed gameplay and community giveaways. We also established Doritos Triangle Island as an evolving virtual gaming destination where players continue to organically interact with the brand and keep an eye out to see what we might launch next.
The X factor that makes the decades-long relationship between Doritos and gamers' work is authenticity. So, Doritos partnered with top Fortnite Twitch streamers, including TimTheTatMan (6.9 Million followers), to host live streams and join the hunt. The influencers genuinely loved playing the game as much as we did, which led to multiple peaks in user retention and playtime.
Doritos Mart In-Game:
- 123,909 unique visits
- Exceeded year-one benchmarks in both retention rate and average playtime:
- 41.58% retention rate (compared to 5.76% for the original Triangle Island)
- 21:00 average playtime (compared to 14:08 for the original Triangle Island)
- Organically earned a spot in the Fortnite Prop Hunt creator games trending games section
Doritos Mart Experience at TwitchCon:
- 1,942 items found within our IRL Prop Hunt
- Doritos Chippy Reel on Twitch IG received almost 6K likes and over 103K views
- Doritos x TwitchCon post on Twitch IG received over 6K likes and 950K+ total views across all 3 streams, with over 2mm stream minutes watched
- 15,000 samples of Doritos BBQ distributed
- 2,000 Doritos x TwitchCon branded tote bags given away
- 3,412 Grand Prize entries received
- 17:00 average time spent at Doritos Mart booth
- 27% lift in unaided awareness onsite and post-event
