“Freakout” success not that surprising, really

Hopefully everyone’s had the chance to see Burger King’s latest campaign – The Whopper Freakout.  The King put on his sneaky hat some time back and tried to convince patrons at “a regular Burger King” that the Whopper had been taken off the menu.  Permanently.  While this is essentially a high school prank being executed (with hidden cameras of course) by a multinational corporation, the results are giving the folks at Crispin Porter + Bogusky another chance to pat themselves on the back and giving consumers some of the highest ad recall rates in recent history.

Now beating the drum that I always do, my favourite component of this ad is that, in addition to showing real customers sharing their strong feelings and oddly heartwarming memories about Burger King and the Whopper, the commercial is really designed to drive people online.  Once they show up at www.whopperfreakout.com, as directed by the movie-teaser-style TV spot, they’ll be treated to an extended eight minute video featuring dozens of real customers, and of course a guest appearance for the King himself.

Now sure BK had control over all this content, so the Freakouts that backfired will never be seen.  And sure there’s going to be split opinions from the world of ad critics on such a stunt, if only to direct a little more traffic to their blog.  But I don’t care.  The very first time I saw this add and its tantalizing URL at the finale, I turned immediately to my laptop to get in on the joke – and that’s where you can’t argue with this campaign.  Whether or not I actually liked what WhopperFreakout.com had to show me is irrelevant (but really, who doesn’t enjoy watching others get upset on hidden camera?). What is relevant is that a 30 second spot caused me to spend an addition eight minutes with the brand, in the process remembering my own past of heading up to BK when my friends were working the kitchen and “buying” out all the Whoppers left in the kitchen before they were thrown out for closing time.  And while neither my metabolism nor my conscience could handle such an act a decade later, the point is I watched, I reacted, I engaged and I remembered… pretty much on cue.

When’s the last time a commercial did that for you?

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