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
