If your TikTok feed was flooded with people singing along to Burger King’s catchy “Whopper Whopper” jingle last February, you can blame Dentsu Creative for making OKRP’s earworm even more inescapable. 

Approximately 12,500 TikTok users participated in Burger King’s “Sing It Your Way” karaoke challenge, which tapped into the existing meme culture around the jingle and encouraged TikTokers to add their own voices to the viral song. And for people who still couldn’t get enough of the Burger King ditty, the TikTok challenge drove nearly 2 million people to Spotify to stream the song an additional 8 million times.

The karaoke challenge is just one way Dentsu Creative helped clients including Burger King, 7-Eleven and Subway connect to pop culture via both creative and social media campaigns throughout 2023. This marks the creative network’s second year in operation after its formal launch in June 2022 and is further proof that this is not your father's Dentsu.

As 7-Eleven’s creative and social agency of record, Dentsu Creative fleshed out the convenience store chain’s social strategy by bantering with the company's online community and posts that jumped on pop culture moments within hours.

When the brand’s followers began questioning why 7-Eleven stopped car-focused content after spending 2022 courting car enthusiasts, Dentsu Creative used the frequent comments of “Where car?!” as a springboard for a scavenger hunt for several 7-Eleven branded vehicles hidden in the game Fortnite. And after Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase compared himself to 7-Eleven, saying that, like the convenience store chain, he’s “always open,” Dentsu Creative created a merchandise line less than five days after his comparison with the brand went viral.

Dentsu Creative also helmed 7-Eleven’s “Anything Flows” summer ad campaign designed to revamp the brand’s Slurpee for young consumers. The campaign highlighted the creativity involved in pouring a 7-Eleven Slurpee with a slew of vivid, colorful TV spots and a partnership with rapper Flo Milli to “give Slurpee the summer anthem it’s always deserved,” according to the agency. 

And as Burger King’s social agency, Dentsu Creative launched two other campaigns on top of its “Whopper Whopper” karaoke challenge—one tied to the movie “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” in which the agency partnered with Matty Benedetto of @Unnecessary Inventions to create a “sauce slinger,” and another surrounding a campy Halloween-themed short film from “American Horror Story: Coven” director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. Denstu’s social media work for Burger King brought the brand nearly 305,000 new TikTok followers in 2023.

Dentsu Creative also won the Pharma Grand Prix at Cannes for the “Scrolling Therapy” app it developed with Latin American pharmaceutical company Eurofarma, designed to help Parkinson’s patients exercise their facial muscles by using facial recognition technology to turn their smiles, frowns and other expressions into controls to scroll through or play videos.