I am impressed with Burger Kings latest marketing campaign, which combines both Television and the Internet advertising, and includes elements of viral marketing and social proof.
Their TV commercial shows a few clips of people’s reaction to being told that the Whopper has been discontinued (the social proof element of the campaign). Then a website URL, http://www.whopperfreakout.com, is displayed. The website just contains a video that is basically just a longer version of the TV commercial, but is entertaining enough that people would enjoy watching it and would likely tell other people about it (the viral element of the campaign). Burger King was smart enough to include embed and email features with the video so the video could be easily shared. The TV commercial was interesting enough to make me want to check out what was on the site, and I am sure many other people did the same. Here is the video shown on the Whopper Freakout website:
By integrating TV advertising and the internet Burger King is hoping to get a lot more out of what they paid for for their TV ad. They are basically using their TV ad to launch a viral internet video campaign. It looks like the campaign just launched a few days ago, so it isn’t really an internet phenomenon yet, but it has potential. Below are the graphs from Technorati, which shows mentions of “Whopper Freakout”, and a traffic data chart from Alexa for the past week.
Mentions of “Whopper Freakout”
There has already been some talk about this campign on the blogosphere. The following are just a few posts on other blogs:
Whopper Freakout really sells.
