Brand: Burger King (Burger King Corporation)
Execution: TV, Online, Viral
Target: BK Families
Rating: ****
Reviewer: David Vinjamuri

Description:
A series of online and TV spots that feature hidden camera footage of actual Burger King customers being told that the chain no longer serves Whoppers after ordering one. The spots document the range of reactions from the upset customers.

What Works:
This campaign works well because it borrows wisdom from one of the biggest marketing blunders of all time: Coca-Cola’s conversion to New Coke in 1985. Sergio Zyman, marketing chief at Coca-Cola at the time learned that although the flavor profile of the revised Coca-Cola formula was indeed preferred to the old version in blind taste tests, consumers had a strong emotional attachment to Coca-Cola. The surprising and unexpected consequence of the botched move to New Coke (which was eventually withdrawn from the market) was to boost share of Coca-Cola (renamed Coca-Cola Classic). Why? Because consumers threatened with losing something remember why they value it in the first place.

Crispin Porter & Bogusky, creators of “The King” (spots this advertising blog panned) has done an excellent job of translating this painful marketing lesson into an entertaining series of hidden-camera spots. The simple setup (tell a customer ordering a Whopper that Burger King no longer serves them, wait for the reaction, then deliver the burger after all) effectively makes the viewer focus on the emotional connection between BK customers and their whoppers.

A side benefit of this advertising is to reach customers that Burger King has been neglecting of late - adults and families. Although not the core audience for Burger King, these groups build loyalty among children who become the young men that drive fast food sales nationwide.

What Doesn’t:
Although The King - in his trademark plastic head - is not nearly as distracting and alarming in these spots as in previous versions, he still is a polarizing figure who may not help the Burger King brand in the long run.

Branding Bottom Line:
Finally something from Crispin Porter we can sink our teeth into.

Brand: Burger King
Execution: Adver-game (Self-Liquidating Promotion)
Target: Kids and young adults
Rating: ****
Reviewer: David Vinjamuri

Description:
Burger King and Crispin, Porter & Bogusky have created a series of Adver-games for the Microsoft X-Box 360 featuring the Crispin Porter character “The King” and sold at Burger King stores. Kate Macarthur at AdAge reports:

Sporting titles such as “Pocketbike Racer,” “Big Bumpin”‘ and “Sneak King” and featuring the King, his pal Brooke Burke, the Whopper Jr. and the Subservient Chicken, the games are compatible with the Xbox and Xbox 360 platforms. Each game is available for $3.99 with the purchase of a BK Value Meal. Some stores sold the titles individually, while others sold them as packs.

Crispin, Porter reports that the games have sold 2.7 million copies in the first five weeks of availability, putting them on the top ten list of games sold for the X-Box 360 in 2006.

What Works:
While we have been critical of Crispin, Porter’s efforts on behalf of Burger King in the past, we feel that adver-games are a great idea for Burger King and an underused marketing tactic overall. Even given their low production value relative to commercial games, an entertaining adver-game gives the marketer an opportunity to deliver the brand message in a more relevant and impactful manner than through conventional media. And as a self-liquidating promotion (i.e. a promotion whose minimal cost to the consumer nevertheless pays for the production and distribution cost of the promotion), it is an extremely effective way to reach nearly 3 million brand users with a strong brand message.

Using the King as the hero in these games also puts them a step above the famous ‘Subservient Chicken’ promotion (also created by Crispin Porter for Burger King) in branding terms. There is no question that kids playing these games will remember Burger King and that the brand experience will be enriched. Adver-games also play more to the important youth audience for the brand than bored office workers.

What Doesn’t:
Although these adver-games are extremely effective at delivering the brand message for Burger King, we still do not agree with the brand message. In fact, we are not sure that we understand it. The King is an edgy action-figure-cum-celeb-cum-best-friend, but what does that say about Burger King? What does the restaurant own in positioning terms? We’re not suggesting a features and benefits pitch here, but we’d at least like to see Burger King staking its claim on a particular user or context for the brand.

Adver-games can be tricky, too because marketers are not game makers and may not be able to judge whether the game product coming from an agency will be greeted enthusiastically by gamers.

Branding Bottom Line:
Crispin Porter puts the creepy King where he belongs - in an X-box.

Brand: Burger King
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here (move your cursor to ‘Explore BK’ and click on ‘BK Cinema.’ The reviewed spot is titled ‘Press Conference’)
Target: Teenage Football Fans
Rating: *
Reviewer: David

Description:
A press conference featuring the Burger King (a man in a king costumer wearing a large plastic head mask) and his agent, Drew Rosenhaus. Rosenhaus is a real sports agent and was the basis for the movie “Jerry Maguire.” Drew fields reporters questions for the King, mostly centered around the King’s ‘big head’ and his reasons for being an NFL holdout. As it turns out, the King is not holding out because he has a big head, but because of the success of the double Whopper. Then the spot shows a visual of the double whopper which is replace by the new triple whopper with the voiceover, “This season the King is bringin’ it.” The spot ends with the Burger King ‘Have it Your Way’ logo.

What Works:
The Burger King has become a recognizable icon and Burger King has shown some consistency in its advertising for period longer than a year which is a change from the company’s modus operandi for the past generation. The branding in this spot is excellent, both from the King himself and the product shots at the end. This spot is ownable and unlikely to be copied by competition.

What Doesn’t:
This advertising blog is generally a great fan of consistency, except when it means stubbornly sticking to an advertising strategy that is not building the brand or increasing sales. Undoubtedly Burger King and ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky have more research than we do about the effects of this campaign, but one thing cannot be disputed - Burger King itself has performed abysmally since hiring Crispin Porter and initiating the Burger King Campaign. (See our analysis of the Crispin Porter relationship here and CNN Money’s take Burger King’s operating results here.) From a brand positioning standpoint, we dislike this campaign because it does not define the core user for Burger King, show how the brand uniquely meets consumer needs or establish a relevant identity for the franchise. The King character is all about attitude which we suspect is intended to appeal to teenage boys. The flaw with this strategy is that brand loyalty for this category is established earlier and BK is now alienating families with the King campaign (the King spots were among the most disliked advertising produced last year in the United States.) So while we normally support consistency, we feel it is time for a change at Burger King.

Branding Bottom Line:
Forget ’stay the course.’ Burger King should cut and run.

Commentary by: David
Issue: The Burger King to star in Halo-type video Games

Advertising Age reports today that in addition to stalking BK consumers, winning log-rolling championships and romancing Brooke Burke, the Burger King (as incarnated by Crispin Porter) will soon be starring in a video game. This story was broken by Kotaku.com and confirmed by AdAge.

Our quick take? Great idea, terrible brand. While we sympathize with the desire to create more engagement around the brand, we believe that engagement is not useful unless it builds the brand equity. What builds brand equity? Talking about some crazy stunts that the brand mascot has pulled? Possibly - but only if those stunts link to something unique, ownable and relevant about the brand. We do not see how getting shot up - or shooting people up will build the Burger King brand.

Why is Burger King doing this? They have mistaken effect for cause. The big consumers at fast food restaurants are young single adult males. They are hugely profitable for these restaurants. There is no argument here. But this is an EFFECT, not a CAUSE. These men are loyal to these restaurants because they built their loyalty as children. The loyalty was created by a family experience. In revisiting these restaurants and overconsuming they seek to recapture the sense of belonging that they lose once they are pushed out of the familial nest and before they build their own family.

Trying to win over these consumers as adults is foolish and may be largely futile. At best, fast-food chains risk turning them into value consumers, loyal to whichever chain offers the best discounts. At worst they will alienate the families that provide their future heavy consumers.

We applaud the marriage of video games and brands. Video games have been unjustly neglected by a marketing community which does not understand them or the gamer. But this is a bad move for Burger King. Parents will not appreciate seeing the Burger King in yet another very adult role - one even worse than the role of Stalker he has been playing on TV for the past year. And they may turn away from Burger King as a result.

Brand: Burger King
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here To View
Target: Burger Guys
Reviewer: David
Rating: **

Description:
A musical number featuring the ‘Whopperettes’ this fifties style reenactment constructs a burger with women flopping down one after another dressed as bun, lettuce, burger patties, etc. They sing a modernized version of the ‘have it your way’ song. The end number where the burger king number is done to a burlesque theme.

What Works:
We like two things about this ad - it continues the ‘Have it Your Way’ theme that was the heart of the last successful Burger King campaign two decades ago. And it has good branding which is certainly Burger King and will not be confused with competitors -or anything else on this earth.

What Doesn’t:
The past year of pointless Burger King advertising continues with a twist. This advertising has been very critical of the “King” ads which attempt to turn the Burger King into your best pal (or a stalker depending on who’s watching). These ads are intended to stimulate ‘buzz’ -which they do - but do not link to any value proposition for Burger King. This ad is more ambitious because it attempts to tie the strings together (and if the viral BK campaign featuring Brook Burke is to be believed, marry the King off in the process). Here we see the classic BK theme song, a production number meant to bring us back to the golden age of burgers along with the King. The problem is that it is just too much. The whole production falls down under its own weight, spinning out-of-control into confused irrelevance. All the while trying to promote the dying icon of past glory - the Whopper - when the market is heading another direction and Wendy’s is already doing a good job capturing the diehard burger guys.

Branding Bottom Line:
Just get us out of the way when that Whopper comes crashing down.

Here is our first take on the hits and misses of the game, by category:

CELEBRITY

Hit - Desperate Housewives (ABC) - Shaquille O’Neal, Hugh Hefner etc.
Instant Analysis - A nice job of using celebrity to show that absolutely everyone is watching Desperate Housewives. Turns celebrity on its head. ABC does a nice job of using its own time to build one of its own brands.

Hit - Debit MasterCard - MacGyver
Instant Analysis - We reviewed this spot before the game (click here to read review and watch video). It does a great job of bringing the God of Small Things - MacGyver - to the card for small things - Debit Mastercard. A good balance of big-game production value and solid marketing.

Miss - Pizza Hut Cheesy Bites - Jessica Simpson
Replace Carls and Paris Hilton with Pizza Hut and Jessica Simpson and you have this equally irrelevant spot which uses sex in a puzzling way. It not only fails to support the brand - it does not even make sense in context. Click Here to view.

HUMOR

Hit - Sprint Phones - Two spots do a nice job of showing the benefits of high speed phones with TV and downloads for Sprint. The first has the phone with the extra benefit of “Crime Deterrent.” The second is about the music and ends up with a Benny Hill romp around the room. What makes these work is that the humor connects to the product and the brand and the phone is very visible in both. Click Here to view.

Miss - AmeriQuest Mortgage - The ‘Don’t be too quick to judge’ spots are both very funny, but even professionals will have a hard time remembering the brand - which shows up only at the end of each spot. Click Here to view.

CAUSE MARKETING

Hit - Campaign for Real Beauty (Dove) - We have been critical of Dove using the Campaign to sell Dove Moisturizing lotion (click here) but for the Super Bowl Dove used its marketing dollars to promote the campaign instead. In the end, this will do more for Dove than the earlier spots. (Click Here to view)

Miss - The Beer Institute - The Beer Institute? Beer needs an industry group? It was nice to learn all of those foreign words for ‘cheers’ but with Budweiser spending nearly $20 million on the Super Bowl, nobody was going to forget Beer. (Click Here to view anyway.)

NEW PRODUCT INTRODUCTION

Hit - Hummer H3 (General Motors) - This is an older spot we have previously reviewed (click here) but one that worked well for the big game. Even though we would like more face time for the Hummer, this spot reinforces the ruggedness of the brand very well. (Click Here and turn of your pop-up blocker to view the spot).

Miss - Full Throttle (Coca-Cola) - This pre-game epic spot pulls out all the stops to convince you that you’ll be meaner and badder with Full Throttle Energy drink - including running a Red Bull car off the road. At the end we’re confused and Coke is a bit poorer.

Miss - Gillette Fusion (Procter & Gamble) - Not as bad as we had expected from the preview spot, but a flop nonetheless. Gillette does try to give us a plausible reason for adding two blades and draining our wallet further (more contact points equals less pressure equals less skin irritation) but it seems weak and irrelevant. We’re still more interested in real fusion - or maybe cold fusion. (Click Here to view - 2nd Quarter spot.)

OTHER NOTABLES

Hit - Budweiser Clydsdales (Anheuser-Busch) - Anheuser-Busch wasted a lot of money during the big game with spots that were all over, many of which were just forgettable beer commercials. This one, however, connected at an emotional level. Fortunately, the Clydsdales are so closely tied to Budweiser that there is no question which beer the spot is pushing. And the value of authenticity seems like it is Bud’s best brand proposition. (Click Here to view - 3rd Quarter)

Miss - Emerald Nuts - In the early 1990’s in Los Angeles, we learned that random success (like buying some beach property in L.A. in the 1970’s) makes people think they are geniuses. But sooner or later this random-ness fails. After spectacular luck last year with a quirky little spot, these random geniuses failed spectacularly. But perhaps the real nut fans will love it. (Click Here to view)

Commentary By: David
Issue: Does the Message Matter?

“I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.” - Lily Tomlin

2005 has been a difficult year for an industry which acutely feels the sands shifting beneath its feet. TiVo was not invented in 2005, but it became relevant. Network television buys did not suddenly become more expensive and less effective in 2005 (it has been a 10 year trend) but advertisers started to notice. When Procter & Gamble announced that it was shifting a substantial portion of its behemoth marketing budget away from network television advertising, it confirmed the industry’s worst fears.

It is telling, then, that in 2005 the industry would laud agencies whose primary focus was to break through the clutter at all costs. The poster child of this movement has for some time been Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Creativity Magazine (an Ad Age publication) this month named Cripin Porter “Agency of the Year” with a splashy and breathless writeup that proclaimed,

All of the work CPB submitted … just worked. It got into faces and into lives and into the cultural stew … at a time when the smartest people in the industry are making shit up as they go, the agency’s brain trust is making up stuff that often seems, in its own sometimes silly way, important.

Creativity goes on to write up the major accomplishments of Crispin Porter for 2005, starting with the Burger King campaign which they called “A genuine pop culture phenomenon.” (The ThirdWay Advertising Blog’s review of the Burger King Campaign can be found here)

How ironic, then, that USA Today would choose virtually the same moment to survey the American public for their opinion on advertising. And on the list of the 10 most disliked spots of the year is none other than — Burger King (click here to read the USA Today article by Theresa Howard).

Not only did ‘the King’ lead the top 10 list as the most disliked ad (30% of Americans hated the spot which tied it with Capital One’s pillager ads), but it failed to make the top 10 list for either Young Americans or Men, suggesting that it was not just women who disliked these ads.

Crispin Porter might cleverly point out that the Burger King might have been the least liked campaign of 2005 but it was also perhaps the best remembered spot of the year. And here is where we take the great leap of faith with this most disturbing trend in advertising - that attention to your brand, even negative attention, must be good.

Ideally, we could look at this campaign’s impact on Burger King’s brand equity to ferret out the truth. Unfortunately, even a proper analysis of Burger King’s short term results eludes us as the company is privately held. The chain trumpets a growth of 1.1% in same store sales in the Third Quarter of 2005 (click here for Burger King’s press release), which is very close to the US core inflation rate for the quarter. And even if Burger King was reporting much stronger sales results, the truth lies not in the present but the future of the brand. What will the cumulative effect of this type of advertising be on future sales? Will talk about Burger King and some amount of loathing for the “Burger King” character translate into a stronger brand?

It is possible. But there is little to suggest to this Advertising Blog that Crispin Porter and Burger King have changed the nature of brand equity and brand affiliation. We agree wholeheartedly that advertising must be memorable to be effective. After all, we watch television, too - we know that many ads by well-meaning consumer packaged goods companies look like literal storyboards of the brand strategy and command just as much of our attention as would a videotape of the six-hour corporate strategy sessions that led to their creation.

But the answer is not to walk away entirely from the idea of building a brand proposition. Spots like the BBDO campaign for Motorolla’s ROKR with iTunes combine energy and visibility with a reason for existing - they help us understand the product while building the brand.

This Advertising Blog is not qualified to judge Crispin Porter as an agency. Our job is the mundane one of asking whether the advertising really helped to build the brand or bring in revenue. From this perspective, we’ve seen little in the “buzz” school of advertising that leaves us hopeful.

Brand: Burger King
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here - The link is to Adland Ad-Rag which requires a small payment to view spots
Target: Big eaters
Rating: **
Reviewer: David

Description:
A lumberjack cuts down a tree in the forest with a chainsaw. As it falls, it reveals the Burger King - a man wearing the costume of a king with an oversized plastic face. The Burger King stares silently at the lumberjack who looks surprised. After a moment’s pause, the Burger King reveals a sandwich behind his back which he hands to the lumberjack. The spot cuts away to a product shot of the “Meatnormous Omelet Sandwich.” Shots of the lumberjack eating the sandwich are interwoven with cut shots of the sandwich being constructed. “Meat on top of Meat on top of Meat” is the billing for the sandwich. The final shot shows the lumberjack and the Burger King log-rolling on a pond together like best friends. “Wake up with the King” is the tagline.

What Works:
The folks at Burger King have certainly generated lots of buzz for these ads. Not only is the blogsphere buzzing about the King, but ‘King talk’ has invaded everyday conversations. The not-unintended side effect is to remind people that Burger King exists, something that previous ad campaigns did not do effectively. This spot is linked to a strategy of bucking health trends and focusing on bigger, meatier food for Burger King. A small percentage (less than a fifth) of fast food patrons account for a huge portion of fast food sales. These folks are male and grown and eat huge portions at these restaurants. Burger King has made a strategic move to market directly to these people and it has largely paid off. For the first time in decades, Burger King looks to have the upper hand on McDonalds.

The spot itself does not forget to link the Burger King back to the new brand positioning of ‘bigger, meatier food’ and the product shots do a good job of paying off the premise. The style and tonality of these spots is also distinct and would be difficult for a competitor to copy.

What Doesn’t:
Now that BK has introduced a new friend into our life, how do we feel about him? And more importantly; (for this advertising blog ) what does the Burger King do for BK’s brand?

In the blogsphere and at barbeques around the U.S., the debate over the Burger King goes something like this:

“He’s cool. He’s there when you need him,” says the guy.
“He’s creepy. He’s a stalker. He freaks me out,” says the girl.

Of course this conversation does not divide perfectly along gender lines but the split is obvious enough that we must ask whether the effect is intentional? The answer - of course.

BK is playing to the core of their audience with the Burger King - those heavfy-eating males that are the bread and butter of the sandwich business. And they seem to appreciate the Burger King. Therefore this campaign meets the objective of ’solidifying the base.’

We must ask if this is a good long-term strategy for the brand, however. Many strong brands do not hesitate to alienate or turn away potential consumers outside of their base (think Harley Davidson, for instance). They do this because they know that it will strengthen their appeal to insiders and provide a halo that will attract more business.

But what about a brand where the insiders are regarded as neither aspirational nor experts by the rest of the brand users? In this case, marketing to the base can create a stronger, but smaller brand. If women with children are not attracted to the disturbingly silent Burger King, will they walk away from the restaurant.

These questions are not yet answerable. Nor is the question of why BK walked away from “Have it your way” which was in the recent past after decades of bad-idea BK campaigns had failed to erase it from the popular memory. “Have it your way,” spoke to a fundamental difference in both philosophy and operations between Burger King and McDonald’s. It gave consumers a clear and defined choice which inherently favored Burger King. The spots featuring the personified Burger King do no such thing. Although the jury is very much out on this campaign, our feeling is that Burger King has stepped across an invisible boundary and may feel the pain much later.

Branding Bottom Line:
The Burger King gets our attention, but we’re breaking into a cold sweat.