National Burger Day

Who the hell comes up with these things? Me, that's who. #NationalBurgerDay

I invented National Burger Day for Mr Hyde (a daily email for men) a decade ago on my birthday. The first three years were a ton of graft; and now it has outlasted both Mr Hyde and ShortList its partner magazine.

People often joke about who comes up with these stunts; but the mechanics of it were actually incredibly focussed and successful. National Burger Day was made up of two separate verticles—- the main one was a data grab, having hundreds of restaurants give 20% off on a day in late August when they were very likely to be empty or dead; we would get details for the people that wanted the vouchers for 20% off and we would share that with the restaurants where the vouchers would be used. That data would be the mainstay of subscriptions for Mr Hyde. The secondary verticle was a big party with StreetFeast. Did I mention that I made National Burger Day my birthday?

This was pre GDPR and socially I spent most of my weekends at StreetFeast in Dalston. There I met Zan from Bleecker Burger and Holly who was doing the PR for MeatLiquor. This was when MeatLiquor was the hottest spot by a country mile—- people were queueing for hours to get a Dead Hippy. They had never done a discount, but decided to get on board for the first National Burger Day. Having Bleeker and MeatLiquor on board gave us the immediate social kudos to make the rest of the popular burger chains get involved.

I was acting head of marketing for Mr Hyde— the person who would have the job was starting in September with a new budget; so I had some capacity and some budget and ShortList Magazine pages to give lots of publicity to the idea. America had National Hamburger Day and National Cheeseburger Day but we had nothing of the sort. I decided to roll out a campaign for Mr Hyde with 20% off Burgers on the 27th of August and a massive birthday party at Street Feast with the all of the best burger purveyors coming together. The burger restaurants appearing at the event took it incredibly seriously and the events were incredible. Working with JD and Adam Layton from Street Feast was always about pushing to have the absolute best experience for our guests.

It was magical. I went door to door and ended up with 176 restaurants giving 20% off and built a Burger Map of those offering. We had Byron, Honest, and lots of others. We weren’t going to McDonalds or Burger King, but we were on top of the burger craze and wave and capitalised on it. The first party was 1800 people, which grew to over 3000 at Hawker House

I sent stickers to each participating restaurant (massive pain— never to be repeated) but we trended early on twitter and stayed there all day and night. We ended up with thousands of voucher downloads and the restaurants were thrilled as tons of people without vouchers filled their seats. As Mr Hyde had no skin in the burger game, we were not competing with the restaurants we were promoting so it was a win win for everyone involved. There was no risk and only potential reward and was worth the restaurants promoting on their own channels as well. Being featured on Money Saving Expert’s weekly mailout was a huge boon for the restaurants as well.

The allure and sexiness of a brilliant event with Street Feast gave us assets to promote the following year. The event included picklebacks and beers with the tickets. It sold out quickly and was a brilliant example of synergy between events and publishing. It was the perfect audience of AB1 men and women with expendable income. We had a burger pinata and an amazing DJ and the magic of Street Feast meant the start of a six year relationship. Finding a non competing brand with identical values was the biggest win out of the activation.

I wore a handmade burger tiara and had an amazing birthday as the Burger Queen. At one point GBK put me on the cover of their magazine and had a Jamie Burger on the menu.

It continued to grow until my final year at ShortList in 2017 where French’s Mustard and Pepsi Max were sponsors and we had over 1500 restaurants paying an admin fee to take part. Today I watched as Sainsbury’s and Burger King tweeted about National Burger Day; knowing that what started as a birthday stunt captured the nation’s imagination and remains a solid feature of the annual calendar.