Social Launch
Case Study — 04
#Slider
Break
"Building a social presence by showing up where the brand already belonged."
"Building a social presence by showing up where the brand already belonged."
[ The Challenge ]
White Castle was coming up on its 100th anniversary — a natural moment to reintroduce the brand to a generation that maybe hadn't thought about it in a while. The challenge was that the brand had very little social presence and zero presence on TikTok. This was genuinely new territory for them.
So the job had two layers: connect with Gen Z in a way that actually felt authentic, and help the brand feel confident stepping into a space it had never really played in before. Neither of those things is small.
Here's where it got interesting. Through social listening, we discovered that White Castle was already showing up in culture. The brand just hadn't fully clocked it yet. Gamers were already talking about sliders — not because of any campaign or brand push, but because a hot, satisfying bag of sliders during a long gaming session had apparently become a whole thing.
And the part that really caught our attention? Female gamers were driving a meaningful portion of that conversation. In a category that often overlooks them entirely, they were already there, already engaged, and already associating White Castle with something they loved. This wasn't a story about introducing a brand to a new audience. It was about a brand finally seeing an audience that had been there all along.
We built the strategy around behavior that was already happening — which is always the move when culture has done half the work for you. Instead of trying to insert White Castle into gaming culture from the outside, I led the development of a creator strategy centered on micro-influencers with deeply engaged communities. We slid into the DMs of creators who already had a genuine connection to the brand.
This approach also had an internal job to do. The brand was stepping into social for the first time and needed to see that this could work. So the strategy had to deliver both culturally and as a proof of concept.
The campaign came to life as #SliderBreak, positioning White Castle as the perfect mid-game ritual. You know the moment: the multiplayer lobby, the quick pause between rounds, the "okay but I need to eat something" energy. That's where sliders already lived, and that's where we showed up.
We partnered with creators who shared their own slider stories, capturing how the brand already fit into their routines naturally. The content was designed to feel native to gaming culture — not like a brand that had just discovered gaming culture existed.
But the impact that mattered most wasn't just the numbers. It was what it unlocked internally. We showed White Castle that they already had a place in culture — they just needed someone to point to it. That shift in confidence changed how the brand thought about showing up on social going forward, and that foundation is worth more than any single campaign metric. And the proof is in the sliders: White Castle still uses #SliderBreak in their content to this day.
[ Campaign Content — Instagram ]
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