charal — buildboard challenge

Context

With 130 million+ active users, Minecraft is not only the best-selling video game ever created — it is the biggest players social community in the world.

To introduce its beef burger to a younger generation hard to reach through traditional film ads and billboards, Charal — the iconic French meat brand — wanted to entertain where they spend their time, on Minecraft, and asked the Minecraft community to do what it does best: BUILD.

Idea

The Buildboard Challenge: challenging players to build a virtual Charal burger promo billboard in Minecraft to get a real Charal burger in return.

Execution

To make the experience exciting, Charal crafted a unique gaming brand experience. An adventure across the world (Paris, New York, Dubai) to solve puzzles, accomplish parkours, collect all the hidden resources, to build virtual Charal promo billboards, post them, and get real Charal burgers in return.

Results

Virtual Charal burger billboards flooded social channels. Media took notice, and the most famous French gamers joined in — like Aypierre, streaming to his 2.3M followers.

The result: 90,000+ players, 270,000+ hours of priceless brand engagement, and €2 million+ in earned media. The Minecraft community kept building, building, and building — creating the first ever in-game billboard media plan entirely built by the players themselves.