Crispin Porter & Bogusky Keeps Getting Better for BK
Jan 13, 2009 Advertising, Internet
Burger King’s ad agency of record continues to do great things for the company as they continue with their outstanding viral marketing campaigns. Crispin Porter first deployed a successful campaign by delivering the Subservient Chicken to us in 2004. This campaign was followed by a less than successful circus type campaign. In 2007 the ad team came back with the Whopper Freakout which was based on the idea that the Burger King was a “Whopper Free Zone”. Placing cameras around BK and filming unsuspecting guests as they were notified that the Whopper was no longer on the menu fueled some pretty interesting reactions.
This year the agency has outdone themselves again. Whopper Virgins, has rivaled the online success of the prior year’s Whopper Freakout as covered by Ad Age. The concept is simple; go to places that have not experienced a Whopper and show how they eat it and how it fares in a taste test against a rival burger. The impact is phenomenal. I recommend taking 10 minutes out of your day to watch it in its entirety. The responses are both moving and compelling. One of the reasons why this campaign may actually do better than the poor campaign is that it evokes emotion.
I will admit, when I first saw the words Whopper Virgins, I was disinterested. After seeing what all the hype was about, I am glad I checked it out.
An additional ingenious viral marketing scheme by the BK is the Facebook Application Whopper Sacrifice which rewards users with a Whopper if they ditch 10 friends. With that, it is becoming more clear that organizations will be continuing to take less than traditional approaches to advertising and marketing.
Tags: ad agency, Advertising, burger king, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, interactive advertising, interactive marketing
January 13th, 2009 at 11:10 am
You cannot create a viral campaign. You can make it easy to be one, you can make something so interesting people pass it on, but you cannot create a viral campaign.
This was a great idea that everyone liked.
January 13th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Wow. Thanks for this post, it’s simultaneously awesome to see someone’s first bite into something we take for granted (and enjoy it) and horrible to see them consuming our most stereotypically fatty export.
April 6th, 2009 at 8:10 am
For the record (ha), CP+B is BK’s ***traditional*** agency of record. BK has a number of agencies of record.
Also for the record, while CP+B has had a few BK successes (and as much as I loved the idea of Whopper Sacrifice, I’d love to see some metrics, because I just can’t see that having had a very strong return), they’ve been outnumbered by some profound failures.
No one remembers CockRock because BK’s legal dept. ordered it pulled from the web less than half an hour after it rolled live. I know that because I was the one who was tasked with pulling it.
That campaign cost a fortune, had zero return, and got CPB sued by Slipknot.
Remember Chickenfight? Neither does anyone else.
I could name plenty more.
The rebranding effort CP+B led in 2003 (? maybe 04?) was strong and has had excellent results. They also convinced BK to tighten their focus, as well, going after their strongest target, 18-25 yr old blue-collar males, and that’s had good results, too. But bottom line, BK is still a way-behind #2 (and barely holding on to that; in fact, they may have slipped to #3 behind Subway by now), and their stock recently received the dreaded two-star rating from Motley Fool.
I don’t know that that kind of performance rates any kudos.
I love change, and I love that advertising is taking some new and fresh directions, but most of this stuff is in shakedown cruise mode.
I’m going to be very hesitant to call anything a success until I see that it is actually resulting in $$$ for the client.
Success must be measurable.
April 6th, 2009 at 8:52 am
@Elise Thank you for the feedback. Having lived in the agency world for a while so I realize that there are several agencies of record for each client. In that environment agencies strive to be “the” agency for the client. You and I know that will never happen because having multiple agencies in the mix creates healthy competition.
Also, you are absolutely correct about metrics and results. I like to preach transparency and ROI. So, I believe that metrics are of the utmost importance in illustrating to your clients that a campaign is working.
While I admit that this post was a little premature given that the campaign was in its early stages of deployment, I still believe that they were successful in creating an emotional attachment to something that most take for granted. A hamburger.
Remember the circus campaign for BK? I would like to forget that one. As much as I hate to admit, I have been part of some campaign “misses” as well. However, I think that it is important to have feedback like this so long as that we learn from the mistakes and continue to get more creative with advertising.
April 6th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Oh, we all have misses in our past, there’s no doubt about that. I have plenty of my own.
I think my primary point in all that babbling was that in my opinion, CP+B is all about BUZZ. And I’m always skeptical of agencies that define themselves that way. Simply because I strongly suspect that when an agency’s comfort zone/area of “success” is buzz and buzz only, it’s because that agency can’t stand up to real measurement.
If you can’t show me any work that has real, quantifiable numbers — concrete rather than abstract success — numbers/metrics/dollars instead of warm fuzzies — then I have to assume you’ve got a little bit of an Emperor’s New Clothes thing going on.
I agree with your point about creativity, and as I say, I love experimenting with new, fresh, interesting, and even lunatic ways of doing a very old job, but when you define success as “anything that makes the client more famous,” you really have lost me.
I mean, unless your client is Paris Hilton, that theory is so very flawed.