by SEO Consultant
R. Falconer
Burger chain Burger King has produced a number of fantastic and highly successful viral advertising campaigns in the past. People loved the Subservient Chicken and freaked out over the Whopper Freakout. The latest campaign is Whopper Virgins, a sort of international Pepsi Challenge style taste test, pitting the Burger King Whopper against MacDonald's Big Mac. People who have never tasted a Whopper (or presumably any burger) in Greenland, Romania and Thailand are asked to try the two. We, the viewer get to see the results.R. Falconer
Whopper Virgins is a pretty slick piece of viral advertising by Burger King and it will undoubtedly be successful in raising the profile of the Burger King brand. It won't be as successful as Subservient Chicken - which was particularly subtle - because Whopper Virgins is a far more corporate, possibly exploitative, slightly unethical, burger mad endeavour which will put many people off sharing it.
Blogosphere backlash aside, where Burger King has really made a whopper, is with their search engine optimisation. The campaign is "Whopper Virgins", type this into Google and you'll see the Burger King site at the top position. No problem yet. That comes for the large number of searchers who type in "whopper virgin" (no plural), where the Whopper Virgins site ranks, well, not in the top 100.
In the UK the number one result (from this IP address, right now at least) is a fool.com article, criticising the Whopper Virgins campaign. A look at the traffic for the two terms shows that around a third of searches are for the non-plural version of the search query. That's a big chunk of traffic to lose.
Making big mistakes with viral marketing is easily done as proven by Starbucks in 2006. Starbucks gave out tokens for free iced coffee to their staff in the South Eastern United States and told them to pass the tokens on to their family and friends. This was intended to be confined to a small area but Starbucks failed to take into account that the medium they had chosen to distribute the tokens, the internet, has a far wider reach than the small area they had intended. Once the error had occurred, Starbucks failed to capitalise on all these potential new customers and instead turned the situation into a public relations disaster by not honouring the tokens.
Sony also made a big error with a PSP campaign. They set up a site, supposedly by a couple of kids who wanted PSPs for Christmas. Then they uploaded a YouTube video, entitled "All I Want for Christmas is a PSP" which contained the kids rapping about their desired Christmas presents, they then posted fake comments in praise of the video. Obviously, it all looked pretty stilted and it became obvious what Sony had done. Sony needed to grovel to get back to square one. Unfortunately, their apology was also seen as insincere, they continued to try to use cool, hip language but continued to fail. The end result of the campaign was that Sony went from semi-cool to alienated from their core consumers in the space of a few days.
So what's the moral of the story? Viral campaigns can be hugely successful, but only if you play them right.
