Whopper Detour
Burger King
Issue 51 | June 2019
Agency
FCB New York
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer Ari Halper Worldwide Creative Partner Fred Levron Executive Creative Director Gabriel Schmitt Associate Creative Director, Copy Laszlo Szloboda Associate Creative Directors, Art Alex Sprouse, Akos Papp
Production Team
Director of Integrated Production Adam Isidore Producer Henna Kathiya Production Company O Positive OOH Chem Creative Animation and Print Zombie
Other Credits
Account Supervisor Sarah Tarner Project Manager Jesse Morris Business Affairs Lead Janice Katz Media Horizon Media PR Alison Brod Marketing + Communications Social MullenLowe
Date
December 2018
Background
Innovation was essential in the fast- food industry for brands to remain both competitive and relevant.
Food orders via a mobile app had increased from 11% in 2015 to 40% in 2018. By 2020, mobile ordering is poised to generate $38 billion in sales.
Burger King was late to the game and needed to overhaul its mobile app to offer order-ahead functionality.
Idea
McDonald’s outnumbers BK restaurants two-to-one in the USA. So, the idea was to turn McDonald’s advantage into their own by inviting consumers to use the app to order a Whopper for just one cent. However, the one-cent Whopper could only be ordered by standing in a McDonald’s.
To do this, 14,000 McDonald’s stores nationwide were geofenced. If a user was within 600 feet of a McDonald’s, the BK App unlocked the promotion. As soon as the order was placed, the app navigated the customer to their nearest BK for pickup.
Results
During the nine-day promotion, The Whopper Detour garnered 3.5 billion impressions, an 818% increase in Twitter mentions for the brand, and $40 million in earned media. The app was downloaded 1.5 million times and for several days ranked #1 on both iOS and Google Play app stores. Burger King saw the highest foot traffic in over 4 years. Despite the fact that Whoppers were going for a single cent, the total sales value sold through the mobile app increased by threefold during the promotion and has doubled ever since, a result 40 times bigger than BK’s historical digital promo record. Overall, the campaign yielded an ROI of 37:1.
Our Thoughts
At the D&AD Festival in May, a top creative was on stage saying that Burger King’s teasing of McDonald’s was “so last year.” How wrong can you get? It’s so this year and, quite possibly, so next year and the year after that as well. This is a strategy that can run and run. Remember Avis vs Hertz? I enjoy the way that Burger King has identified McDonald’s as the enemy and is going after them here and everywhere. (See what the brand is up to in Brazil on pages 60-61.) It seems that Joe Public enjoys it too. In being cheeky and funny and using tech in an innovative way, BK is moving its status towards that of a much- loved brand, leaving McDonald’s in an emotionally colder place. Another instance of creative marketers allowing their agency to shine.