burger king
Battle of the Burgers
Capabilities:
It was the biggest moment of his young life. The 17-year-old from West Germany uncoiled his body for the second match point. The ball arrowed wide to Kevin Curren. Curren wasn’t fast enough. Unseeded, unfancied and unknown, Boris Becker had just become the youngest male ever to win a Grand Slam.
Burger King has always been the Becker of the burger world, albeit seeded. It’s the plucky underdog in a war that has raged since the dawn of fast-food. A no-holds-barred, bloody battle in which there could be only one King. In 2018, it was game time.
500m
Eyeballs on the ads.
#1
In the app store.
50k
Website hits in one day.
On one side, the plucky underdog Burger King. On the other, McDonald’s, a behemoth whose advertising arsenal is the size of a small nation's GDP. Burger King’s biggest strength was their ‘big burger’, the Whopper. It was, according to its tagline, the ‘Home of the Whopper’. But 67% of Britons didn’t even know what a Whopper was.
Don’t play it safe.
We were confident in our fighter. The Whopper - a flame-grilled beef burger with all the trimmings - was Burger King’s crowning glory. This is what happened, blow-by-blow.
Whilst everyone was going green, we went burger. For one day only, we served nothing but Whoppers. Customers had no choice, but in a good way. On top of that, we gave away free Whoppers to anyone who downloaded the Burger King app whilst on TV, spots featured customers being shunned for daring to ask for a ‘cheeseburger’ at the Home of the Whopper.
We drove around Westminster in a double-decker bus with a line that didn’t hold back any punches plastered on its side.
At the end of 2019, we went for the jugular and revealed the Whopper of a Secret. From print to TV, OOH and in-store advertising, we’d hidden a ‘Big’ Mac behind every single Whopper shot.
In 2020, a global pandemic closed all live music venues. But when we heard U.K. rapper Tinie had dropped a new track called Whoppa, our ears pricked up. We booked Tinie to perform. His stage? Whoppers, up and down the country. All this was powered by special QR codes printed on Whopper wrappers that, when scanned, generated a tiny virtual Tinie performing his track while dancing on top of the burger. It is believed to be the tiniest gig ever.