Denny’s Super Giveaway Redux: Now with More Follow-through

The 2.0 version of Denny’s Super Bowl breakfast giveaway handed out about the same number of free breakfasts as last year: 2 million Original Grand Slams served between 6 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 9, according to the company.

But this year’s promotion, launched with two 30-second spots during the big game, was intentionally designed to do more than give away product. And according to post-game analysis from both within the family casual chain and from outsiders, those broader aims may have succeeded.

According to Denny’s, the Web site has received almost 49 million hits since the return of the breakfast giveaway was announced in late January. The Web site has also received almost 24 million hits since Sunday’s game.

That’s important because unlike last year, Denny’s Web site piggybacked other offers and promotions on the 2010 giveaway, including a new sweepstakes linked to its Denny’s Rewards loyalty program. In that game, the pool of new members who register for the points program by February 14 will be eligible to win a free Denny’s breakfast each week for a year. The chain will start pulling one winner a week from those new names shortly after the eligibility phase closes.

The Super Bowl ads and food giveaway publicity have resulted in almost 300,000 new registrations to the Denny’s Rewards program to date, the company said. Another rewards-based offer, also touted on the Web site, will give a free burger and fries to the first 500,000 new registrants to the loyalty program.

The company has also worked with Filter Creative Group to post Webisodes on its Facebook page featuring the same “chickens in hiding” that were stars of the Super Bowl ads. The nine videos focus on what the chickens are doing with their time while hunkered down to avoid the mass egg consumption posed by the Denny’s give away: things such as donning duck disguises, training an intern named Brian, and phoning prank calls to a Denny’s customer service line.

In fact, the phone number given in the video for that line is live and encourages callers to leave Denny’s a message either on the phone or on the Facebook page.

Denny’s has about 98% brand recognition in the U.S., and 95% of the country has been to one of its 1,500 restaurants at some point in their lives. So the Grand Slam Giveaways, both last year’s and this one, were meant to build buzz around the chain and to remind people of what they liked about it.

“Last year our goal [with the Super Bowl Grand Slam giveaway] was to get Denny’s back on the map in a number of consumers’ minds,” marketing vice president John Dillon said in an interview the Friday before the Super Bowl. “We definitely did that, with 50 million people visiting our Web site in the week after the Super Bowl and 2 million people coming in for a free Grand Slam” – 60% of them customers who had not been to a Denny’s in the previous six months, he said.

But while last year’s giveaway got plenty of attention, the campaign was less sticky than Denny’s had hoped. “[The 2009] Super Bowl campaign hit all but one success metrics for us, and the one it didn’t hit was that the impact didn’t last as long as we wanted it to,” Dillon said last Friday. “it gave us an absolutely fantastic first quarter of 2009, but our sales did not sustain that for the rest of the year.”

As a result, the 2010 giveaway was strategized to be stickier. “It’s got to drive more of our sales for the rest of the year,” he said.

For that reason, Denny’s opted to run a third ad during the game touting the systemwide return of its program offering customers a free Grand Slam Breakfast on their birthdays—something the national chain discontinued in the ‘80s.

As for the buzz factor, the Denny’s promotion was a Top 10 Trending Twitter topic during the last quarter of the game and during the hours of the Grand Slam giveaway on Tuesday. The chicken ads were ranked 37th in popularity among all the commercials shown during the broadcast, reportedly the most-watched single program in U.S. history with an audience of 106.5 million, according to The Nielsen Co.

Google reported in its official blog that terms associated with the Denny’s TV spots (including “Denny’s free breakfast’ and “Denny’s locations”) were among the most frequently searched ad terms during the broadcast, spiking after each in-game airing. The only competition they had in Google Search was terms relating to “free pants”—a reference to the promotion that Dockers ran during the same game.

“This year, the prospect of ‘free’ dominated the searched-for ads,” Google software engineer Jeffrey Oldham said in the blog post.

In a statement issued yesterday, Denny’s CEO Nelson Marchioli pointed out that matching last year’s giveaway total of 2 million Grand Slams was all the more impressive because of the snowstorms that blanketed large portions of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states during Tuesday’s promotion.