Telia’s Dinner Assassin takes out teens in Fortnite so families can eat together
Tackling mealtime screen time stand-offs without lecturing anyone, Norwegian telco Telia hires a pro gamer to eliminate teens from matches.
Dinner is ready but your teenager can't come to the table. Not because they don't want to, but because they're mid-match in Fortnite, and in a game with up to 100 players, there's no pause button. Walking away means abandoning their squad, losing progress, and — as far as the average 14-year-old is concerned — social ruin. For parents, it's the same standoff every evening. Norwegian telco Telia, working with agency Try, found a way to defuse the issue.
Telia recruited Emil "Nyhrox" Bergquist Pedersen, a former Fortnite World Cup champion who stepped away from competitive play, and gave him a new job: eliminating kids from their games before dinner gets cold. Parents visit telia.no, submit their child's in-game username, and book Nyhrox for a free session. He enters a private lobby, goes one-on-one with the kid, and ends the match. Game over, food's hot, no argument needed. Instead of lecturing kids, the campaign provides a solution both parents and kids can appreciate. All slots were claimed within days.
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What makes Dinner Assassin work is that it doesn't ask the teen to pick a side. Getting taken out by a former world champion isn't a punishment — it's a story to tell at school the next day. The match ends with a player's credibility intact, and dinner happens without a fight. In Norway, 43% of children game daily and 75% of parents with kids under 16 worry their children spend too much time on screens.
Telia has built a longer-term position around this friction through what it calls "screen health," with earlier initiatives including a physical phone-deposit box for mealtimes and a parenting course on digital habits. Dinner Assassin is the most inventive addition yet — a reminder that sometimes the most a brand can do with a daily standoff is show both sides it understands them. Unless Telia figures out how to deploy an army of AI Nyhrox clones. Then dinner might actually be on time.
P.S. Meanwhile, in Brazil, fast food chain Bob's found its own way into meals and gaming culture. Working with agency Artplan, Bob's used PUBG's "death comms" feature — the few seconds after elimination when a player's mic stays live — to broadcast discount coupons to everyone on the server. Partner players adopted usernames referencing rival fast food chains (Mc Clown and King of Burgers), turning themselves into irresistible targets. Thousands of last word coupons were distributed during matches throughout March.
