Whopper Virgins

Burger King have caused a shitstorm with their latest campaign; inviting impoverished members of remote villages around the world to participate in a taste test between Burger King’s Whopper and Maccy’s Big Mac.

The trailer:

The film:

Amelia has written it up nicely here and I think I agree with her on the whole moral debate of this campaign. Although it is painful to see one of the world’s largest symbols of commoditisation happily paying the bill to get a chopper to drop in a Burger King BBQ in order to cook the Whopper on location (to perfection obviously), from a marketing perspective, the whole campaign is bang on.

Three main pull outs for me:

PR
Get a PR brain in brand strategy planning. It works. If the old chestnut of all publicity is good publicity is true, this campaign ain’t doing bad (I wonder if CPB have worked out advertising equivalent values yet?!) At the end of the day, when you pay for media space with an ad, yes you can control what is contained in the ad, but it doesn’t make people believe in what you are saying. Picking up on Amelia’s ‘Bogusky PR’ point, the press are already getting their teeth stuck into the campaign suggesting the creatives really know how to answer a brief! And the comments below this article really make for interesting reading discussing the pros and cons of the campaign, who is patronising who, etc and this is indeed what PR folk are very good at creating- in fact one agency  in the UK has already coined the term ‘talkability’ as a registered trademark! Of course I’m bias but in today’s digital age it’s a no-brainer surely?

Content
Online, if you create content that is worth passing on, this is a “viral”.  I’ve blogged about this before; don’t brief in a ‘viral’, look to create something interesting and newsworthy – i.e. if you had no media budget, what would you do? What’s the story? Does it pass the ‘so-what?’ test? This is what journalists, TV producers and PR’s  do (admittedly some are better doing it than others) everyday. If you want to create content, surely you want to hear from a marketing pro who has been trying to be a part of content as a day job?

Google
…is the new front page, the new anchorman, the new Moira Stewart, the new Dermot Murnaghan, the new Michael Burke. If this is where a lot of people start to find information online, we have to give a shit about the other results that come up and how this shapes brand perceptions in consumer’s minds. i.e. what are the branding implications for searching through google for the campaign? Does the fact that a large percentage of the organic search results are negative ad credibility or detract from it? Does it make the brand edgier? What other brand equity does it build if any?  Does it draw people in to finding out more about the campaign because we can see it has already been spoken about before we’ve clicked the BK paid link?

But I do like the campaign. As a 24 year old male  who does occasionally eat fast food (in between my muesli, pomegranate seeds, tofu, yoga and green tea… a-hem and who the campaign is probably laregly targeted at), the campaign appeals. With this and the Family Guy tie up, BK seem to be getting their ‘game face’ on right now.