--- title: "10th Shorty Awards: QDOBA Queso Wars Gold" url: https://stacklist.com/card/8ce69639-3d88-4b44-8365-bcdb13f202b8 source_url: "https://shortyawards.com/10th/how-qdoba-trolled-chipotle-and-won-the-twitter-queso-wars" stack: https://stacklist.com/c/business/stack/fa6d8bca-357c-476c-9ff5-cf91f01ffc2e summary: "QDOBA won a Shorty Award for their #TheirWordsNotOurs campaign that leveraged user-generated content and animated GIFs to capitalize on negative sentiment around Chipotle's new queso launch on Twitter. The campaign strategically targeted Chipotle consumers through paid media amplification of fan tweets, turning social chatter into a competitive advantage." tags: "social-media, marketing-campaign, user-generated-content, twitter, brand-strategy, queso-wars, gif-animation" key_entities: "QDOBA (organization), Chipotle (organization), Shorty Awards (event), Twitter (technology), queso (concept), user-generated-content (concept), #TheirWordsNotOurs (concept)" classification: "analysis" content_hash: "sha256:78146b6a583287c224745a4838265267e1fbcf99dcd7305a7773bbdb2eca84af" acp_version: "0.2" token_counts_approximate: 1472 visibility: public agent_accessible: true status: "final" --- # 10th Shorty Awards: QDOBA Queso Wars Gold THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists! 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Until Chipotle decided to throw its hat into the ring by launching a queso of its own. And the much-smaller QDOBA faced a new challenge: how was it supposed to compete against Chipotle's tortillian-dollar advertising budget? Surprisingly, the internet threw shade about Chipotle's new queso in a not-so-positive way. When QDOBA started seeing these negative comments about Chipotle's queso, they realized they had an opportunity to be strategic in their social messaging, if they moved quickly to take advantage and ownership of the queso social chatter.   Strategy and Execution While Chipotle was getting negative queso reviews, QDOBA launched #TheirWordsNotOurs, a campaign on Twitter where all the content was sourced from QDOBA fan tweets. We turned our favorite QDOBA queso-loving tweets into animated GIFs, and amplified these GIFs through a paid media strategy targeted against Chipotle consumers who mentioned queso. But the fun didn't end there. "TheirWordsNotOurs" was also used for some savage trolling by responding to negative Chipotle queso tweets with a tongue-in-cheek QDOBA GIF reaction with a redemption coupon for QDOBA's queso.   Results QDOBA's #TheirWordsNotOurs Twitter campaign garnered more than 13.4M impressions, 3.5M media views, and over 90K engagements within the first 24 hours. Not only did our campaign have a massively positive sentiment rate, we surprised and delighted unsuspecting Chipotle Queso haters with 3,000 witty custom tweets from QDOBA, including a coupon code to redeem queso for their taste buds. Not only did QDOBA rightfully own the queso conversation in social, they also were able to deliver a positive QDOBA queso message to Chipotle queso haters and a chance to convert these Chipotle queso haters into QDOBA queso lovers.   Media Video for How QDOBA Trolled Chipotle and Won the Twitter Queso Wars Share this entry Entrant Company / Organization Name Mistress, QDOBA Links https://twitter.com/qdoba/status/948333398925500417 https://twitter.com/qdoba/status/942792798922612736 https://twitter.com/qdoba/status/942847678177730560 https://twitter.com/qdoba/status/942801793725095936 https://twitter.com/qdoba/status/942787213502251009 Entry Credits Scott Harris Partner, Creative at Mistress Christian Jacobsen Partner, Strategy at Mistress Adam Wagner Creative at Mistress Elizabeth Levin Creative at Mistress Lixaida Lorenzo Creative Director at Mistress Maggie Cadigan Brand Director at Mistress Berna Dikicioglu Project Manager at Mistress Kristin “KB” Busk Director of Social Strategy at Mistress Michael Chiem Community Manager at Mistress Jack Zegarski Producer at Bastard Productions Ryan Duggan Animation Director/Lead Illustrator at Bastard Productions Moises Jimenez Animator/Illustrator Bastard at Bastard Productions Allison Barnes Director of Media at Mistress Share this entry Share this Shorty Awards page  Tweet  Share  Email Share link