Exclusive: How Shake Shack Used Reddit and AI to Drive Sales

Shake Shack added a secret sauce to its latest advertising campaign: generative artificial intelligence.

The burger joint used full service agency Known’s Reddit-focused gen AI chatbot, The Big Letbotski, to scour over 80,000 active subreddits for contextual conversations around chicken sandwiches. The bot zoned in on phrases such as “healthy lunch on Sunday,” “where can I grab a good deal?,” “gourmet fast food” and “healthy alternatives to burger.”

Shake Shack found 30 subreddits specific to those contextual conversations and ran targeted ads across those subreddits promoting its Chicken Shack Sundays giveaway in April.

The 10-day campaign resulted in over 13,000 ad clicks, surpassing its benchmarks for the platform by 31%. And it drove people into the Shack.

“Overall, we exceeded our Sunday sales expectations,” Mike McGarry, vice president of brand marketing at Shake Shack, told ADWEEK. The company wouldn’t share details about how much this increased sales by.

Brands like Zipcar, Diageo and Progressive are using gen AI tools to boost their marketing efforts. Marketers are slowly moving past the initial hype of gen AI, aiming to use it as more than a novel tool, but as a strategic driver of tangible return on investment.

Reddit contains a wealth of data and signals from its users, with over 100,000 communities on the platform. But brands tend to be cautious about showing up and serving ads on the platform in the most relevant way.

AI to understand conceptual intent

People are unlikely to jump on Reddit specifically to discuss, “I would like to try a chicken sandwich on Sunday.”

Instead, Shake Shack focused on scanning Reddit for topics related to antibiotic-free chicken and sandwich shops open on Sundays (unlike Chick-fil-A). The company then strategically placed targeted ads around these themes.

The Big Lebotski’s model assigns the descriptions of a subreddit into a series of numbers. The bot scanned Reddit in its entirety for phrases such as “healthy,” “fast,” “high-quality” and “deliciousness,” scoring each Reddit conversation based on its proximity to these concepts to find the best fit for the campaign’s objectives.

Based on these scores, Shake Shack roughly identified 500 phrases that aligned most closely with its promotional goals, ultimately running ads across 30 subreddits.

Large language models have spurred the shift from keyword matching to understanding the conceptual intent behind ideas, said Kern Schireson, co-founder and CEO of Known.

“We’re not trying to use AI to be fancy or to make it complicated,” said Schireson. “We’re using AI in places where traditional age, gender and psychographic targeting aren’t sufficient to get to a level of detail that will cause a campaign like this to perform.”