Burger King plants a Whopper on Google Home
New TV ads trigger the devices to chat about hamburger
Burger King could be cooking up a flame-broiled ad war with Google.
The fast-food restaurant chain is serving up TV commercials that cause Google’s voiceactivated, artificial intelligencedriven Google Home speaker to start talking about the Whopper sandwich. In the first version of the 15-second ad, which ran Wednesday on TV and is on YouTube, a man dressed as a Burger King worker asks the camera, “OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?”
That question triggered Google Home speakers to read the introduction to Wikipedia’s page devoted to the Whopper. The ploy worked fine for Burger King until Wikipedia users began editing the Whopper Wikipedia page to include phrases such as: “The ‘Whopper’ is the worst hamburger product sold by the international fast-food restaurant chain Burger King,” and that ingredients included “rat and toenail clippings” and a “mediumsized child.”
Wikipedia subsequently locked the Whopper page from new edits. And by Wednesday afternoon, Google had deactivated the ad’s ability to trigger Home devices.
But Burger King launched two slightly tweaked versions of the ad late night Wednesday on episodes of NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy
Kimmel Live on ABC in New York, Miami and Los Angeles.
By substituting the voice saying the command with a woman’s voice or a different male voice from the man seen in the ad, the new spots again activated Google Home devices. When USA TODAY tried the ads Thursday morning, Home once again started listing Whopper ingredients, courtesy of Wikipedia.
For Burger King, the ad served as a way to tap into the growing ownership of home speakers with AI-enhanced digital assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri — and of course, to generate some buzz. The company on Wednesday saw three times the activity on Twitter as it did the previous day, it said in a statement to USA TODAY. The chain, which is owned by Ontario, Canada-based Restaurant Brands International, long has been known for its wacky ad campaigns.
Burger King ’s TV spot helped generate word of mouth, which likely translates into more visitors at its restaurants, said marketing professor Jonah Berger of the University of Pennsylvania’s The Wharton School and author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On.
“This is particularly valuable to Burger King rather than, say, McDonald’s or someone else, because Burger King wants to be known as an edgy restaurant or establishment that does interesting, creative and different sorts of things. It’s part of their brand equity,” he said. “For them, it is not enough just to do the same old, same old. They have got to come up with creative things, and I think this is a great example of just that.”
Google may not be officially on board — the company has declined to comment. But it can still win from Burger King ’s move because “a whole bunch of people who didn’t know what Google Home was or hadn’t heard of it may (now) go out and buy one,” Berger said.
Google may have inadvertently set the stage for advertisers to play with Google Home with its own advertisements. During the Super Bowl, the “OK, Google” in a Google ad set off Google Home devices in owners’ homes, to their surprise and annoyance.
But copy-cat advertisers should beware. “The first time someone tries something, it’s creative, innovative and everyone says it’s great,” Berger said. “But two weeks from now, if every brand is doing this with every ad, people are going to start getting pretty annoyed.”