Media Strategy Analysis Of Burger King

MEDIA RELATIONS CAMPAIGN ANALYSIS
CAMPAIGN: BURGER KING WHOPPER SACRIFICE

1. Evaluate if the campaign has strategically addressed the campaign’s objective(s)?
Yes, from the perspective of Burger King, the campaign was essentially a success as they had over 23.3 thousand people to unfriend their friends. That’s a total of over 233 thousand people unfriended on Facebook just for a Whooper. They reinforced the customer’s enjoyment of the product as well as the product itself. Furthermore, the campaign proves there is a discrepancy between what constitutes as a “Facebook friend” and a “real friend”.
Having the Facebook app disabled only further proves the campaign’s success. Burger King even pivoted the campaign in order to continue to encourage

Facebook’s current and future value is based on a quantitative experience through its use of banner advertisements. These ads operate through the quantitative number of users that are connected as friends, which ultimately means that the number of friends is directly related to Facebook’s profits.
Hence, the unfriending activity popularised by the campaign, while qualitatively beneficial to Burger King and users, were highly destructive to Facebook’s core economic value system. Facebook doubted the suitability of the application and shut down the campaign after just 10 days.
According to O’Brien (2015), Burger King was also faced with global criticism as many people felt that the campaign was unsuitable as it promoted hate. Burger King was also under fire for branding online friendships as ‘commodity’ and giving out rewards for morally ambiguous actions.
This campaign certainly illustrates the risks companies take when launching controversial campaigns on third party social media sites. While the tactics used by Burger King were highly successful, the suitability of the campaign’s platform proved to be the fault that caused its short lived run.

4. Evaluation Plans

Facebook users.
This is what advertisers have been looking for in order to break through the social networking walls and see success. A reward (even one as small as a coupon for a free Whopper) goes a long way towards getting users motivated to support a branded and/or sponsored campaign.
By incentivizing an action that many users are looking to do anyways, Burger King is providing a service that may help their application achieve what other branded applications have struggled with: Quick and sustainable adoption. Users looking for an excuse to clean out their friend list of old and forgotten friendships were in need of a little motivation, and a free Whopper from Burger King may be just enough to move them to action.
Burger King doesn’t want users to stick around, so the success of the campaign is judged by impression numbers and one-time interactions
Crispin Porter + Bogusky thought of the app after many of their staffers were faced with the too-many-friends scenario themselves on Facebook:
“We thought there could be some fun there, removing some of these people who are friends, but not necessarily best friends,” said Jeff Benjamin, executive interactive creative director at Crispin. “It’s asking the question of which love is bigger, your love for your friends or your love for the