Categories: Marketing

What’s Going on With Burger King’s Whopper Freakout Ad?

What’s going on with this Whopper Freakout* ad Burger King* is running? People are ‘freaking out’ over the Whopper. It seems Burger King is removing the Whopper from its menu from select stores, and hidden cameras are recording the reactions of people ‘freaking out’ when they think they find out the Whopper is no longer available.

The ad Burger King is running right now asking “What would happen if they took the Whopper off of the menu?-Whopper Freakout,” is ingenious! How so? Two primary reasons-the ad tugs at one of man’s most basic needs, if not the most basic of physical needs-food. Also, next after man’s needs comes his wants. People have developed a, now, long-standing want for the Whopper.

I know back when I was in college, and had read some material about how the major fast food outlets, Burger King in particular, was clear-cutting land in Central America that their ‘beef’ could graze, and in the process of not only clear-cutting, this large corporation essentially was ousting the native farmers there, I was incensed, and decided at that point not only to boycott buying anymore Whoppers, or anything from Burger King at that point, but also that I would become a vegetarian, too, and not eat any meat.

Well, that lasted about one month, until one day, after many, many, days of passing by the Burger King sitting near the campus with my nose up at them, I couldn’t bear it anymore. That smell of flame-broiled beef that I’d been avoiding finally took over, and one day I literally made a bee-line into the Burger King after little deliberation, and ordered up one Whopper with cheese, no onions, please-and on the double! I can’t imagine how I woulda ‘freaked out’ had they been running this same promo ad at the time. The commercials probably closely capture how I would have reacted. The commercials are hysterical.

On its site, Whopper Freakout dot com, you can view the “experiment.” In a perfectly executed solemn, no-nonsense, voice-over in the ad Burger King says “the customers are real, the reactions are authentic.” The team did a good job in setting the ‘seriousness’ of the scene, albeit it’s all in gist. Henry Alex Rubin, the director of the “experiment,” says on Burger King’s video footage when speaking to the Burger King employees taking part in the farce, “We’re not doing this to be mean, we’re doing this to prove a point.” I would imagine Rubin and Burger King felt the need to explain that, since many of the persons who were (are) told that the Whopper is no longer available, and has been discontinued, were going to feel pretty bad, and that Burger King had let them down. Bad Burger King!Mean, mean Burger King!

In addition to the no-more-Whopper-on-the-menu hoax, Burger King has taken to duping customers by placing a Wendy’s or McDonald’s burger into the filled to-go order bags of the customers, and recording those reactions, too. The reactions are equally as hysterical, if not more, since now not only are the customers presented, or should I say not presented with their beloved Whopper, but there’s a competitor’s burger in its stead. One customer goes on to irately say, “I don’t want a Wendy’s burger, I hate Wendy’s burgers!”

I would think that with Burger King “Freaking Out” everyone with their marketing “experiment,” they’re also, at the least, picking up lunch for these same duped customers. Everyone seems to take it all in stride when they’ve been met at their table or from behind the counter when “The King” makes an appearance and he hands them their Whopper and all involved, now laughing, know the the jig is up. See the added Whopper Freakout link to view in length what commercials you may have been seeing on TV-the Whopper Freakout!