Project Description

Finding the brand’s superpower and building a platform worthy of it.

Brand Context

Jack in the Box has always been the alternative to the status quo in QSR — a brand with a CEO-of-the-people persona, a willingness to be weird, and a menu that refused to color inside the category’s lines. When the business returned to TBWA\Chiat\Day in 2022, the work in front of us was bigger than a campaign. It was to rediscover what made Jack Jack, and to build a brand platform the whole company could rally behind.

The Challenge

How do you relaunch a brand that has spent years without a unifying idea — in a category where everyone is shouting about value, speed, and the same tired dayparts — and give it a superpower that only Jack could own?

Strategic Insight

Most of fast food quietly conforms to a set of unwritten rules: what gets sold, when it gets sold, and who it’s for. Customers are asked to settle — to compromise their cravings to fit someone else’s menu, someone else’s clock. Jack had never played by those rules. Tacos at 2 a.m., breakfast all day, odd and wonderful LTOs — the menu itself was the proof.

The insight was hiding in plain sight: Jack’s superpower isn’t variety for variety’s sake. It’s munch-worthy variety — the permission, and the craveability, to chase whatever you’re actually in the mood for. In a category of compromise, Jack is the brand that lets you have it your way, at your hour, without apology.

That insight became the north star for a platform built to last: So Munch More.

Creative Execution

The work spanned three connected streams:

  • Brand platform development — codifying munch-worthy variety as the organizing idea, with a creative and tonal system designed to scale across every category Jack competes in: late night, breakfast, value, innovation, LTOs.

  • Cultural integrations — partnerships and placements chosen to live where Jack’s audience actually is, from Alex Cooper and Call Her Daddy to Hot Ones Versus, alongside a continued investment in West Coast cultural gravity.

  • Connected campaign ecosystem — a 360-degree launch across TV, digital, OOH, social, audio, and radio, built so every touchpoint reinforced the same superpower rather than competing for it.

The result was a platform the business could run on — not a single execution, but an operating system for how Jack shows up in culture.

Results

  • Debut brand platform for Jack in the Box in years, launched February 2025.

  • “CEO of the people” brand persona re-established across the franchise system and the category conversation.

  • Platform architecture engineered to hold every daypart, product innovation, and cultural moment under one idea.

  • Industry recognition for breakthrough work, including LBB coverage of the first AI game you could actually eat.

Reflection

The hardest part of this kind of work isn’t the launch — it’s the discipline to not name something before you’ve found it. Jack had all the raw material of a superpower for years. Our job was to stop describing the brand and start defining it, then give the whole company a platform strong enough to build on for the next decade.

So Munch More.

Executive Strategy Director · TBWA\Chiat\Day LA