Chuck E. Cheese

Challenge

Giving a small communications team the capacity to operate at a much larger scale

The Chuck E. Cheese communications team, consisting of just three people and an intern, oversees employee communications, external communications, crisis communications, and social media for the company’s 500 locations.

That remit means the team has to move quickly across both proactive and reactive work. It monitors media and social conversations, responds to emerging reputation risks, finds journalists, supports campaigns, measures coverage, and tracks whether the messages behind brand announcements and activations are reaching audiences.

Before Meltwater, reporting was one of the workflows consuming valuable capacity and requiring additional agency support. "We were just spending a lot of time between curating the newsletters or the news reports to pulling reports and data and all that," said Alejandra Brady, Sr. Director, Head of Communications at CEC Entertainment. "I just needed to cut that time significantly down."

The team also needed to respond to potential reputation issues without treating every social post or emerging conversation as a full-scale crisis. For a brand with a highly recognizable character and hundreds of locations, distinguishing an isolated incident from something gaining meaningful attention is a critical part of crisis communications.

Solution

Bringing media monitoring, reporting, crisis intelligence, and influencer marketing into faster workflows

Chuck E. Cheese uses Meltwater throughout its communications operation, from identifying journalists and producing newsletters to campaign reporting and crisis monitoring.

The team receives daily media intelligence and produces a weekly newsletter, while Meltwater reporting helps it quickly analyze campaigns and historical coverage. Instead of relying on manual processes or outside support for every report, the team can pull consistent data itself.

That speed is particularly important during an emerging reputation issue. Brady uses Meltwater to determine whether a potential crisis is generating enough volume to require immediate attention and to understand what audiences are actually saying.

In one instance, a conversation contained highly negative language associated with the brand. Meltwater's analysis helped the team see another dimension of the response: much of the conversation was humorous. That context gave leadership a more complete picture of the potential reputation risk than negative keywords alone could provide.

Meltwater gives the communications team an evidence-based starting point for assessing whether an issue is isolated or gaining meaningful traction. “When someone brings me a crisis, if Meltwater didn't bring it to me, I'm not worried about it,” she said, while emphasizing that this does not mean the issue is ignored. Rather, conversation volume and audience response help the team determine the appropriate level of escalation.

Chuck E. Cheese is also using Meltwater Influencer Marketing to find creators based on audience fit, brand safety, and engagement. The team can identify potential partners, research their audiences, develop briefs, and move creators into campaigns more quickly.

The data has also helped the team look beyond follower counts. Chuck E. Cheese has found creators with smaller but highly engaged audiences who can be effective partners, including creators compensated with experiences such as family visits or birthday parties. The team has also begun testing commission-based campaigns with trackable codes.

Results

Cutting reporting time by 75% and redirecting agency resources

A reporting process that previously took approximately four hours now takes about one hour, representing a 75% reduction in reporting time. The change allowed the Chuck E. Cheese communications team to remove reporting as a line item from the scope of work handled by the company's agency. Rather than paying the agency to assemble reports, those hours can be redirected to other work.

Beyond faster reporting, Meltwater gives the small team greater capacity to handle the volume of work that comes with a national consumer brand.

Building an influencer pipeline in days instead of weeks

Influencer Marketing has similarly compressed the time required to move from creator research to campaign activation.

Previously, it could take weeks to get five to 10 influencers into the pipeline. Today, the team can get approximately 20 into the pipeline in two days. The faster process gives Chuck E. Cheese more flexibility to run campaigns of different sizes without making creator discovery and vetting a bottleneck.

Measuring roughly 8,000 stories around a defining brand moment

Meltwater has also helped Chuck E. Cheese measure communications at a scale that would have been difficult to handle manually. When the company announced the retirement of its animatronics, it used the moment not only to close a chapter in Chuck E. Cheese history but also to communicate what was new about the brand. 

When the announcement generated roughly 8,000 stories across media formats, Meltwater enabled the communications team to bring that coverage together, quantify it, break it down, and analyze whether its intended messages were appearing. As a result, the team could prove to leadership that earned media was carrying its message about the future of Chuck E. Cheese, not just its past.

"Being able to quantify PR results was a first for the brand," Brady said.