Blink Design Studios Ltd

Burger King gets people to dump Facebook friends for free Burgers…

Having worked on a little Burger King recently this article on Brand Republic amused me:

Prove your love – Burger King bribes people to ditch Facebook friends

Burger King has put out some interesting and quite unusual viral campaigns recently such as the “Whopper Virgin”  and the “Subservient Chicken” site, but this one  has gained attention recently for the glee with which it pokes a little fun at social networking whilst using it as a medium for adverting. And very successfully & publicly documenting their brand loyalty.

Facebook users are encouraged to visit the Whopper Sacrifice website where they can install the application, they then  select 10 friends they wish to remove or ’sacrafice’ from their friends list to prove their love for the Whopper and receive a voucher for a free burger.

Usually when someone deletes a friend on Facebook, the friend is not notified and may not notice the action, however the Burger King app posts a personalised BK update to their wall to inform the deleted party that they’ve been “sacrificed for a free Whopper”.

A week after the Whopper Sacrifice campaign was launched Facebook disabled WHOPPER® Sacrifice, saying that they had concerns over potential breaches of privacy associated with the sacrifices of 233,906 friendships. Facebooks official statement was that:

“We encourage creativity from developers and brands using Facebook Platform, but we also must ensure that applications follow users’ expectations of privacy. This application facilitated activity that ran counter to user privacy by notifying people when a user removes a friend. We have reached out to the developer with suggested solutions. In the meantime, we are taking the necessary steps to assure the trust users have established on Facebook is maintained.”

Burger King responded brilliantly and swiftly to a potentially controversial situation. They kept their sense of humour and created even more media and consumer buzz by updating the Whopper Sacrifice web site with a message telling fans that “Whopper Sacrifice has been sacrificed:”

Burger King then took the idea one step further and invented their own Angry gram, they encouraged anyone who had been sacrificed for a whopper to send one of these very funny animated shouting burgers to their now ex-friend. The  “Angry-Gram,” site is very funny and again, a simple fun concept which users really want to engage with and send to friends, whether angry at them or not.  The angry gram site is great fun to play with, beautifully but not overly animated fast loading flash which lets you write a personalised angry gram before sending it to anyone you like. Great fun and expertly executed this site really is as near perfect example of a viral site I have seen in a long time. It comes off the back of the Whopper Sacrifice but has a longevity which means it, although still a gimmick, will have more staying power than the sacrifice site.

Click here to visit the Angry-Gram site.

See the Whopper Sacrafice app in action:

Credits:

The Whopper Sacrifice campaign was developed at Crispin Porter & Bogusky.

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Obligatory advert: Have a creative project? Need a freelance designer? Get in touch here .