Last May Burger King started selling a new item called the ‘Angry Whopper’ in most of their European fast-food locations. The new menu item was received fairly well by the general public which meant that it was only a matter of time before it crossed over to North America. Well fast-food fans, your wait is over because the ‘Angry Whopper’ can now be found at all US Burger King locations starting this month.
So now what is an Angry Whopper? Well, it’s a regular Whopper but with spicy onions, jalapeños, pepper jack cheese, bacon , tomatoes, lettuce, mayonnaise and a spicy “Angry Sauce.” Tasty. Anyhow, the spot featured above takes on the typical Crispin Porter + Bogusky pattern of using humor to help sell burgers, in this case showing us why the onions used in the Angry Whopper are so spicy.
As part of their initial campaign for the European release, Burger King created a micro-site where you can fill out an “Angry-Gram” to send to people who annoy you (in order to let them know just how annoying you think they are), it can be found over at www.angry-gram.com. They also have been airing a few spots to support the campaign in various countries. The most interesting that I’ve come across air in the UK and in Germany. The German one is quiet….umm….’interesting.’
Burger King – Angry Whopper (UK):
Burger King – Angry Whopper (Germany):
As for the more recent US launch, Burger King has just released a Facebook application called the Whopper Sacrifice. Basically what they promise is a coupon for a free Whopper if you ‘unfriend’ 10 of your current Facebook buddies. What’s the catch? This application will have to inform each of those unlucky victims that you have unfriended them in order for you to complete the offer and receive your coupon. Not only that but it adds a little salt to the wound by letting them know that it was all because you would rather have a free Whopper than them as a friend – What a brilliant idea! It combines word-of-mouth marketing with social media in a way that encourages users to spread the application across their online communities. It’ll be interesting to see the analytics on how well this application does in a month or so… i’ll post the results once I receive them. According to their website (at 10:05AM EST on 1/11/09), 158341 “Friends” have already been sacrificed for the sake of free food. It would also be interesting to see how many of those friends were immediately re-added after the coupon was delivered and how many remain friendless.
Burger King has also purchased advertising on the Google Search Network for Angry Whopper related terms:
Quiet an expansive campaign for a new burger…
Thanks to So Good Blog for the info on the EU release
