Fast Friends, Fast Food

This is one of those rare times when we venture out of the world of television to look at what other methods are being employed by advertisers to teach us about their products, and about ourselves.

As our readers know, we here at Drink Moxie are always catching trends at the height of their popularity. Today, we talk about the recent promotion, only a few months old now, from the folks at Burger King by way of Crispin Porter & Bogusky, offering a free Whopper for deleting ten of your Facebook friends (as described in this New York Times article).

As Douglas Quenqua explains, the promotion was brought to a premature conclusion when it was determined that the promotion was in violation of Facebook's policies – specifically, the policy by which users can remove a "friend" without notifying the "friend" who is being unilaterally rejected. But the more interesting question is whether the well-meaning folks at BK/CP&B were breaching our social mores in some greater way, stretching the unwritten social contract between advertiser and advertisee a little too far for comfort.

There's always a level of risk when a brand implicitly touts itself as "the official brand of something," but it can certainly be an effective approach if done smartly. We showed in a previous post how Dunkin' Donuts has successfully, but a little ironically, branded itself as the official sponsor of such everyday annoyances as being late to work and walking across hot sand. The associations aren't necessarily positive, but they're things we can relate to. Some commercials have taken it even further, such as DirecTV, which gave a somewhat sardonic demonstration of how their product can be useful during a bank robbery. (It's a nice spot, featuring Dule Hill and Alan Tudyk – but we're not here to rate commercials). The spot doesn't rub people the wrong way, partly because most people have not been a hostage in a bank robbery and thus can see the humor in it. People who have been taken hostage in a bank robbery might not find the spot so amusing.

Can it go too far? Of course. You wouldn't want your brand to be something people associate with beating one's wife, destructive wildfires, or getting cancer – all things that many people have to cope with on a regular basis, but not anything that people would feel comfortable associating with a consumer product. Between being late for work and getting cancer, there is a gray area.

So where does deleting friends from Facebook fall? Clearly it's something that people sometimes have to do. Whether or not people enjoy doing it is a matter of taste and personality. Now, as far as advertising goes, we all know that the goal is to give the impression that a brand or a product will fit comfortably into the lifestyle they enjoy, or possibly the lifestyle they wish they had. Promotions, in that sense, are typically about rewarding people for something they might already enjoy doing, in other to get people to associate their product with that activity. Hardly ever is a promotion about getting consumers to do something they don't want to do in exchange for the reward. So the CP&B folks were presumably looking, with this promotion, to reach out to customers who already feel that they have too many Facebook friends and would maybe like to have fewer of them. How many people fit this demographic? And are those people now more likely to eat more Whoppers?

BK even takes it a step further as they imagine themselves as social do-gooders pushing back against the over-inundation of personal information sharing that has has been born of the Facebook era. As BK's vice president puts it in the article:

Do you really want to have all these people knowing what you’re up to and what you’re interested in? We wanted to be part of that conversation and part of that solution, and ‘Whopper Sacrifice’ was born.

It's not very unusual, in this day and age, for a company to associate itself with a social movement (note the RED campaign, which we may explore later). Obviously you have to pick your causes carefully. Climate change, AIDS, both are problems that people would love to be the solution to, and if it gets them a stylish cell phone or t-shirt, then you better believe people will get behind it. Fighting the erosion of personal privacy via social networking websites for a hamburger? Hmm. Since people themselves seem to be driving the trend (I suppose all social problems are people-driven, but in this case it seems more willingly people-driven than others), it may be hard to get people behind the cause. But maybe that's the whole point – it's more of an ironic statement than a real social mission, when you consider the dubiousness of the cause together with the triviality of the reward.

This irony might be lost on some people. Those who "get it" may laugh and gain a new appreciation for Burger King as being hip to modern trends and having a sophisticated sense of humor about them. Other people – that is, other Facebook users, who are presumably not completely unsavvy – may take it more seriously. I can imagine people being troubled by the moral quandary between maintaining a manageable level of privacy and considering the feelings of people who have some real emotional investment in a "friend" connection. I can also imagine that people who are grappling with this question may find it rather insulting for a brand to suggest that dangling a free hamburger would make the quandary easier to resolve. You could label these people as oversensitive, but the official action taken by Facebook suggests that it's not a trivial issue for many of its users.

For a brand, I suppose the alternative to getting mixed up in these social issues is to just show things that are either so innocent or so absurd that they stay clear of any moral gray areas, and do not cause the customer to question their own sense of social propriety. This seems to be the competition's approach.



Happy Lent, everyone!