Menulog Baller Banquet

The Menulog Baller Banquet started with a simple enough request: create a fun, interesting way to engage customers through an online loyalty program. But we quickly realised this was an opportunity to move beyond what you’d usually expect from these types of digital marketing promotions – something that’s right up our alley.

The goal we set ourselves wasn’t just to reward customers for engaging with the brand, or even to bring new customers in. We wanted to incentivise different kinds of engagement through gamification. The goal was to give customers a reason to think of Menulog in situations they might not otherwise consider. And, of course, to have some fun in the process.

We captured the vibe of the Snoop TVC in our website design through an art direction we have fondly titled ‘bling bling realism’. Blending real life and fantasy, we mixed photographic scenes and extravagant illustrations to portray a dream world somewhere between real and ridiculous. From the very first scene, we used exaggeration to ignite the imagination of our audiences, tempting them to unleash their inner baller and build the banquet of their dreams.

At the end of the day, Menulog is selling real food to real people. We needed a way to capture the exaggerated baller lifestyle without drifting too far away from the reality of receiving a tasty meal at the end. That’s where illustration came in. After putting together our photo-montage scenes, we used fun, doodle-inspired illustrations to breathe life and energy into the website design. Suddenly, an ordinary pizza slice was transformed into a gooey, stretchy, cheesy bite of deliciousness.

But exaggerated illustrations weren’t quite enough. After all, this was about the biggest party in town. The next logical step was adding motion to bring the static scenes of our gamified loyalty program to life. This did present some technical concerns at first – more motion means a heavier website design, both in terms of the burden on the device and the amount of data to be downloaded.

To minimise the costs of animating and get the party loaded quicker, we created our animations in After Effects and exported using the Lottie plugin. SVG animations allowed us to pack the site with bursts of motion through small vector files that are quick to download, more performant, and often better looking than the video equivalent.

We created these 3D scenes through CSS 3D perspective and transforms. This approach leveraged the naturally 2D nature of the website design to create billboard style flat images that could be extended to full 3D objects. While this gave us considerable power, it would also usually mean that anyone using text-to-speech or reading mode would only see a single text description, without any of the interactive elements of the scene.

To get around this, we took advantage of native HTML and CSS implementation. This helped us foster a more accessible and usable approach throughout the gamified loyalty program. In the final website design, all scene objects are images with accompanying descriptions, and interactive objects are normal html links, making them discoverable with the keyboard for increased usability and accessibility.