Google foils Burger King TV ad stunt

Score one for the tech nerds. A TV spot for Burger King that was set to debut Wednesday night — crafted to create added buzz by “hijacking” Google Assistants across the country — was short-circuited by the tech giant before it ever got going.

The Google techs reprogrammed their voice-activated home assistant gadgets to ignore the burger chain’s TV ploy.

In the Burger King commercial, a counter person laments that the 15-second spot isn’t nearly enough time to describe all the ingredients in a Whopper. He motions the camera to close in and then says, “OK Google, What is the Whopper burger?”

The question is a command designed to trigger a response from Google Assistants in listening range of the question.

But Google got wind of the gimmick and disabled the command less than three hours after Burger King introduced the spot on YouTube.

The short-circuited marketing effort also opened up a battle on a second front — Wikipedia.

Trolls had a heyday editing entries — one erroneously saying the burger contains cyanide and consists of a “medium-sized child” while another smeared the company, saying the Whopper is made from “100% rat and toenail clippings.”

Burger King restored the entry to its original Wiki content — but then the trolls struck again, with the following “Whopper,” decrying it as “the worst hamburger product sold by the international fast-food restaurant chain Burger King.”

By late Wednesday, Wikipedia’s Whopper entry appeared normal, and included a report on the dustup, saying it had “semi-protected” the article to prevent overt promotional descriptions and vandalism.