Burger King’s creative ‘Whopper Sacrifice’ promotion has disappeared from Facebook. The fast food firm pulled the promotion after Facebook disabled a key part of its functionality.

The promotion allowed users to win a free Whopper by dropping ten people from their Facebook friends list. Normally removing someone from your friends list is a low-key affair: there’s no notification and the first they’ll know about it is if and when they realise you are no longer in their friends list.

However, with the application for this promotion, the dropped friend got an automated message telling them of their dumping – and of course suggesting they too cleanse their friends list to win a burger. News of the dumping also appeared in news feeds for the person ditching a friend, which meant more exposure for the product.

Despite the reports, Facebook hasn’t banned the promotion outright; instead it has disabled the notifications, saying that they violated privacy standards for the site. As that drastically cuts the publicity Burger King gets for the campaign, ithe fast-food chain has to pull the application now and give the impression that it was simply too hot to handle.

While it didn’t mention the subject, Facebook may also have had worries about the prospect of the application being used for cyberbullying, particularly coming as a study shows that’s the major risk for children online.

The statistics released by Burger King suggest that could be a possibility. It says 82,771 downloaded the application and removed 233,906 people. Given that users had to ditch ten friends, either a lot of people started the process and didn’t finish (which seems a bit pointless), or that there were a significant high proportion of people who were dumped by more than one user. Even if they aren’t the victims of orchestrated bullying, it sure sucks to be them.

The figures also show how cheap the promotion was by modern standards, particularly from a marketing firm which paid Jerry Seinfeld $10 million for a series of ads. Even if everyone who downloaded the application managed to earn the voucher and then bothered redeeming it (which is very unlikely), the newsmaking promotion will cost under $200,000 – and that’s not even taking account of the profit margin on a Whopper or the cash the firm makes if people buy a drink or fries with their free burger.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 2:00 pm under Advertising, Social Media, Web2.0.

Read more entries by John Lister.
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