In just an 18-month period, we grew the brand from 850 restaurants to over 1,000. Brand health and advocacy numbers are at the highest they have been in the company's history. Sales are growing at an average 20% rate when the rest of the casual dining segment is in decline. And to top it off, the company is one of the darlings of Wall Street. To get there, we developed and extended multiple campaign platforms, each designed to speak to sports fans in different strategic ways.
One key area to our success was to continue to build on the equity of our overtime campaign platform. Beyond our traditional broadcast work, we came up with a never-been-done-before creative/media idea. During March Madness for games that went into overtime, we created a series of unique, specific 15-second ads that appeared immediately following the end of regulation time. Then answered those with another 15-second ad right before returning to the game.
This effort alone led to almost 17 million impressions, over 10,000 specific mentions of #Overtime on Twitter and was called out by sportscasters during the tournament and sports news celebrities like Dan Patrick.