The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have reported on Burger King's latest controversial advertising campaign (aside from Whopper Virgins), Whopper Sacrifice. Essentially, BK will issue a voucher for a free Whopper sandwich if the participant will remove 10 friends from his/her facebook all monitored by a facebook application. To add insult to this Faustian bargain, the removed friends will be notified that have been "sacrificed" for a Whopper.
Usually, those removed are flakes to an invitation or acquaintances, friends with whom one has impersonal knowledge about. The participant perceives these friends as a commodity, wherein they have no productive value i.e. leads to a job, matchmaker; however, they can be traded for a beef patty flame-broiled for a few seconds. It seems that these relationships to facebook acquaintances are dead--they lack any social dynamic. We keep them around like pocket change. Just in case, when our face-to-face friends fade away, we still hold an audience. The faint hope that acquaintances can become close friends. In this situation, one trades the time with those potential relationships for material reality.
BK's scheme reminds me of the pyramid networks that nascent marketers used send messages virally. A friend would have forwarded an email with an advertisement asking the recipient to forward that email to 10 different friends in order to receive a free video game system. Unfortunately, such pyramid schemes do not benefit the recipients since there will not be enough participants to sustain the scheme. With BK's twist, the campaign could have dismantled facebook's pool of users in about 7 layers, assuming nearly everyone participated and saw the "sacrificed" advertisement all the time on facebook. Of course we could all rebuild our networks with more meaning friendships on facebook.
--Brian Tan
4 comments:
I was really excited when they did this. What a smart advertising campaign. Actually, I just got my coupon in the mail. Kudos to them... because I don't really eat fast food because it makes me feel like $%^&, but a free burger is a free burger. In the long run, sure, they want you to get hooked by possibly trying a burger kind burger when you have never tried it before or bringing your family along with you. It's the same with Disneyland. You get free admission on your birthday, but most people wouldn't want to go alone. So, your friends are forced going with you because it is your birthday, and you cannot be denied. Typically.
What if a user [who enjoyed eating BK a whole lot] purposely created a seperate facebook account to satisfy the requirements of the BK application? Is there a way for BK to track those?
If not, I'm signing up for a new account riiight.....now.
JK.
~EC
Most ironic is that many of the relationships "sacrificed" through Facebook were relationships maintained through real-life contact. Of course, after you receive your free burger, it's a simple click to remove the Facebook application and a second simple click to add your "BFF IRL" or what-have-you. So the response that Facebook took in this campaign reveals more about their sentiments toward the services they offer than it does about the true dynamics of Facebook.
Excellent, Brian. I remember getting this notification and thinking it was really funny. I didn't take advantage of it, but it does seem like a great viral marketing scheme. EC brings up a good point: how could BK monitor whether or not participants are living up to the "spirit" of the Faustian bargain? And Anonymous also makes a great point: Facebook's response reveals its own understanding of how its service works, an idealized version perhaps that differs from the reality "on the ground" so to speak. Another interesting application on Facebook related to the idea of friends-as-commodities is the virtual buying and selling of friends-as-pets and making them "perform" activities. That particular application has caused a lot of controversy as well.
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