It’s true though. That’s how we sold it. But originally, it was with DMX to be the front man. So when I was pitching the concept, it seemed only fitting to try and impersonate what DMX would say on camera. There was some swearing. There was some shouting. And, thank my lucky stars, there was some laughter in the room. So it could’ve been much worse, I guess.

But let’s go back ... to before I found myself at the crossroads of one of the most embarrassing presentation moments in my life...

As Burger King’s digital AOR, they asked us to help them come up with some ways to announce that Grilled Dogs were coming to their menu. But they wanted to do it in a way that would catch the world off guard, which was an actual trending strategy at the time.

Simple enough of an ask. But soon, we uncovered a problem: out of the 230,000+ employees at BK, a majority of them had the unregulated tendency to leak new product information on social media before anything ever got released. Making the hope for dropping Grilled Dogs like Beyonce highly unlikely.

But after kicking some ideas around, and over-thinking the hell out of everything we could, we went back to the drawing board and said if we can’t prevent a leak from happening, what if we just made it a part of the idea?

So we dug a little deeper, and found that the first interaction that employees have with all new “top secret” menu items is during their monthly employee training. The videos they have to watch are usually really boring, thus, giving them nothing better to do than to turn to social media to pass the time.

What we eventually came up with was the idea that we would make the most share-worthy training video the staff had ever seen. Then we would use all of their leaks on social as a part of the launch announcement.

Like I mentioned earlier, the idea was originally supposed to be with DMX. But for whatever reason, he didn’t work out. So we went with the second on the list, which was the Dogfather himself. A little more fitting, now that I think about it. And I’ve got to tell you, I’m pretty happy that we went in this direction.