Burger King has had some pretty outlandish ad campaigns–most recently with the “Whopper Virgins” TV ads–but a new marketing scheme that utilizes Facebook is possibly its strangest yet. Burger King is asking people to drop ten friends on Facebook to receive a free whopper.
The Whopper Sacrifice Facebook app will let you print out a coupon good for one free whopper–after you drop ten of your friends. Normally, when someone drops a friend on Facebook it is done discretely, but Whopper Sacrifice handles it differently. The act is published in your news feed, saying “Scott sacrificed Becky Lowell for a free whopper.”
Cruel? Perhaps.
Ridiculous? Definitely.
Effective? Hard to say.
A lot of people will probably drop the ten friends to get the whopper, but there is nothing stopping them from adding the friends back once they get a coupon. More than 50,000 people have already sacrificed friends for whoppers, so the app is getting attention. But most of all it seems that Burger King just wants the attention so people take notice of its bizarre advertising techniques, and on that end the Whopper Sacrifice is a rousing success.