Burger King launches a whopper of a Facebook promotion
When corporations try to exploit social media, it’s often an embarrassment that serves only to amuse the ad agencies involved. But Burger King has come up with a publicity stunt that is at least pretty creative.
The firm is launching a Facebook application with a simple function: delete ten people from your friends list and you get a voucher for a free Whopper. Showing the creative team have a good understanding of social networking (if not a respect for tact), the application sends a message to each dumped friend explaining that they’ve been ranked as less important than a burger – and of course suggesting they also take up the promotion. Adding to the embarrassment, the news of the dumping also appears in news feeds for the relevant user.
The firm is also keeping a running total on its site of how many friends have been dropped through the promotion: at the time of writing more than 55,000 had bitten the dust.
Of course, if Burger King wanted to be really mean, they could keep a tally of which individual user had been dumped by the most people and crown them the world’s most fair-weather friend. However, I’d imagine both psychologists and privacy rights lawyers might have some objection to this scheme.
Naturally any such promotion raises questions of how the public can pull a scam. (In my younger days, every child at my school fully understood the significance of the words ‘purchase not required’ in McDonalds promotion terms and conditions.) Unfortunately this scheme has a one voucher-per-user limit which, given that a fake Facebook account is more hassle than a bogus e-mail address, likely rules out the obvious tasks of repeatedly making and dropping friends.
The scheme is the work of marketing firm Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the same company behind the Microsoft adverts featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld.
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