On Facebook, You Cannot Have it Your Way
Burger King received quite a bit of attention for its Facebook Whopper Sacrifice campaign in which users who removed 10 Facebook friends were rewarded with a coupon for a free Whopper.
The campaign was executed using a Facebook application developed by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the ad agency known for the wacky, the absurd and the occasionally creative.
Unfortunately for Burger King, you cannot have it your way on Facebook. The Palo Alto-based social network shuttered Whopper Sacrifice earlier this week citing privacy concerns. The problem: the Whopper Sacrifice app informed those unfortunate users who were removed by their cheapskate friends that they had been defriended.
According to a statement issued by Facebook, “We encourage creativity from developers and brands using Facebook Platform, but we also must ensure that applications follow users’ expectations of privacy.”
Apparently on Facebook, which is designed to bring the world together, being told that you’re being dumped is a violation of privacy.
That’s unfortunate for adults who can handle the truth (i.e. that their online “friends” would trade them for a hamburger). It’s also unfortunate for Facebook, which promised an advertising revolution but still hasn’t found any guns.
Some, like TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, believe that the type of “engagement” offered by Whopper Sacrifice “is the future of advertising.” Arrington would know. He’s an online advertising expert.
I, however, disagree. While I do think it’s a mistake for Facebook to be anal about branded applications like Whopper Sacrifice, let’s not pretend that Whopper Sacrifice is going to usher in an new era on Madison Avenue.
There’s no doubt that there was value to the publicity Burger King received from Whopper Sacrifice, but a more critical look at the campaign demonstrates just how fruitless even the most successful social media campaigns usually are.
Apparently 82,000 people used Whopper Sacrifice to delete over 230,000 friends on Facebook.
First, 82,000 is a relatively small number for a company like Burger King. For perspective, consider that Burger King sells over 2 billion hamburgers each year. That’s millions of hamburgers every day. To anybody who thinks the Facebook campaign is significant, the question must be asked: “Where’s the beef?” The impact of Facebook’s campaign is a “round cut” rounding error.
Second, the 82,000 user metric is meaningless: the more important metric is how many of those users actually redeemed their coupon and how many of those coupons were actually used. If Burger King really wants to get detailed, it should be able to track the total dollar value of the orders which used the coupon to measure the full immediate sales impact.
And third, while Whopper Sacrifice is a fun campaign, it is intellectually dishonest to deny that these campaigns are quite limited in scale and scope. Once the novelty wears off, that’s it. It’s done. There’s nothing left.
In other words, it’s a gimmick. I’m not sure why so many people who claim to be “social media marketing experts” don’t recognize that there is plenty of gimmicky marketing offline as well and that their online social media gimmicks are not ad innovation. Some gimmicks get a bit of buzz for a short time (like Whopper Sacrifice) and most of don’t. Offline and online. End of story.
To those with an IQ above 75, there’s also the recognition of the inevitable: as more gimmicky campaigns invade Facebook and other social media websites, the less impact they’ll have. Indeed, the only real value Burger King received from Whopper Sacrifice is the value of the media attention it would have otherwise had to advertise to receive. Unless you believe that the press is going to cover every single novelty Facebook application that gets launched by a brand, however, don’t expect this to be a winning formula.
Bottom line: this isn’t the future of advertising. You’re not going to see brands spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop oddball Facebook applications that encourage users to delete their friends, rat on their friends, punk their friends, steal from their friends, pimp their friends and fuck their friends.
Move along folks. There’s nothing to see here. The future of advertising called and it’s sending a cease and desist letter. Stop libeling it.
This may not be the “future of advertising,” which is a dumb phrase anyway, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have worth.
What was the cost of the widget, and what did it cost to deploy it? If the costs per customer are low, there might be a place for this in a company’s advertising budget.
An advertising campaign like this one coupled with an online company like stamps.com, or amazon, may have real value because you could give something to the customer, that they could immediately cash in.
Kill ten friends, get $10 dollars worth of stamps immediately. It would be very easy to track the success of this campaign.
Arrington goes to far in his praise, you maybe going to far in your dismissal.
The Happy Surfer: I think a bit of perspective is in order.
There’s two aspects to this campaign: publicity and coupons.
Forget about the publicity. I’m not denying that there was value there for BK in this area but building novelty applications for short-term publicity is not a viable strategy and as noted, the value will only diminish as the practice becomes more widespread.
What you mention with your hypothetical Stamps.com or Amazon.com examples is not new: it’s called couponing and it has been an established part of the marketing mix for many companies for decades. Hundreds of billions of coupons are distributed each year. It’s a massive business to say the least.
Coupons are important to many businesses but you have to understand that so many coupons are distributed because redemption rates are generally pretty low.
Online coupons are an interesting area (I won’t get into that now) but my points are that couponing is not new, 82,000 coupons distributed is nothing and if startups like Facebook want to become platforms for coupon distribution, they should fire a ton of their current staff and hire people who know the couponing business.
I get what you’re saying, but isn’t one of the problems with advertising, getting people to the door. Like you said, redemption rates are low.
With this medium, don’t companies have the opportunity to increase that redemption rate since it can be done immediately after receiving the coupon. That’s where I think the value maybe.
It has to a better use of money than advertising in bathrooms and trash cans, which seems fairly prevalent in my area.
I’m not a social media guy. I don’t have a facebook account, and I have 20 friends on my myspace account, whom I never communicate with via the platform.
Facebook advertising isn’t going to change the world, but it maybe worth a look at for companies. That’s my only point.
Michael Arrington is right in that this type of user engagement is the future of advertising on social networks. We’re seeing it more and more, and there’s no doubt that it’s more effective for major brands than text/banner ads that no one clicks.
Will it get over-saturated? Yes, and there will be more moaning from users who haven’t had to compromise in life yet about how these gimmicky commercial apps are ruining Facebook etc. But the only way major brands will ever reach consumers on social networks in a significant way is to force them to interact with the ad. I look forward to the day when there are so many companies doing this sort of thing on Facebook that we have to put up with a constant daily barrage of babies whining about how Facebook is being ruined by interactive advertising. I like to see Facebook users experience pain, so I was quite pleased with this campaign.
Frankly, I think the campaign should have been this: The “That guy” app. You win a free whopper if you remove one of your friends. The friend then becomes “that guy.” The guy you dropped so you could eat your cancer burger. Why didn’t they just do this instead and call it the “That Guy” campaign. Crispin Porter + Bogusky, you disappoint me.
made me laugh, “I like to see Facebook users experience pain, …”
another weakness characteristic of these campaigns:
the majority of users that engage in these gimmicks are teenagers… facebook likes to promote itself to digital ad agencies by pointing to the behavior whereby users “fan” a brand or product. my suspicion is though that of the X number of people who become “fans” of mercedes-benz, for example, perhaps .98x are under the age of 22, and a good decade away from having the wherewithal to make a purchase.
this type of ad vehicle will not fly outside a very narrow demographic… to be a platform that represents the future of advertising, it would have to be applicable to multiple, if not all, demographics
“facebook likes to promote itself to digital ad agencies by pointing to the behavior whereby users ‘fan’ a brand or product.”
Facebook is too obsessed with advertising as a form of revenue. They should worry more about creating a product or being the exclusive provider of a product and leveraging their user base toward it.
It got 15 minutes worth on the ad-free BBC Radio 1 drive-time show (as one of the presenters deleted 10 friends one-by-one) despite being US-only. Albeit BK was not mentioned by name (Beeb has her rules after all), but not hard to work out which brand it was.
Not quite in the Tourism Queensland league mind…
@Will. What does “creating… or being the exclusive provider of a product and leveraging their user base towards it” mean?
I mean they should sell more things to the users of the site. They sold those $1 graphics and made 20 million or so (could be more, don’t quote me) over a period of a few months. They’re spending over $400 million year; they need to be more aggressive in terms of selling things (either physical or virtual goods) to their users and not be so hell-bent on the idea that they’re going to change the face of advertising.