Is there some etiquette one should follow when receiving a spam text?
Should one at least read it before erasing it? Should one even attempt a polite reply, even if it is in the negative? Or should one sue the rotten behind off the ungracious crasher who deigns to invade one's cell phone?
If your name is Elizabeth Espinal, you gravitate toward the latter option.
According to the Miami New Times, Espinal was inconvenienced by that slightly creepy King texting her with what she describes in her suit as "cryptic" messages.
You know the kind of thing, enticements to nosh on a splendidly nourishing Burger King steakhouse burger. Or entreaties to please, please try a Mocha BK Iced Coffee. After the first, Espinal allegedly texted back "stop." But the King kept creeping electronically into her life certain, it seems, of winning her over. At least twice more, apparently.
Unimpressed by his wooing her with his "perfect mix of rich coffee and chocolate syrup," Espinal slapped him with what she hopes is a perfect mix of a lawsuit.
The New Times suggested that within Espinal's veritable onion ring of pain lay the idea that she was "caused actual harm" and was "subjected to aggravation."
(Credit:
CC Ted Murphy/Flickr)
Now, we all have our own opinions of fast food. Yes, the purchasing process can be aggravating, and yes, very occasionally our digestion can slip a cog in its delicate machinations, resulting in some temporary harm. But could this all be worth $5 million?
Oh, perhaps I didn't mention, but Espinal is allegedly looking for 5 million whopping dollars. Perhaps the King would merely have to sell a couple of his crowns, but still, it does seem like a lot of money.
She appears to have filed the suit in April of this year as a class action and it has not yet received certification. Her no doubt clever lawyers are relying on Section 47 of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which "prohibits unsolicited voice and text calls to cellular phones."
I understand that Espinal might be on the blistered side of peeved to discover she had to pay for the texts that Burger King sent, even though they might have contained patently irresistible enticements.
But $5 million suggests either that she is a very sensitive human being, or that she believes that the only way to deal with an alleged harasser is to harass them right back.
What if she were to somehow win? Might we all be able to sue those who text us with unwanted inducements? I'm not thinking merely of AT&T, which keeps sending me texts with numbers and concepts far beyond my meager rationality.
What about those slightly odd people we meet at parties and networking events? You know, the insurance salesmen to whom we regret giving our phone number, our business cards, even our names--the ones who contact us suggesting a meeting and then contact us three more times. Might we be able to take them for a few million?
I think I'll text my lawyer and ask him.
You have probably noticed that there's a new Star Trek movie.
You may not have noticed that a new Kingon (yes, Kingon) life form has descended upon our earth, ready to do strange things to us via our underwear. And our nipples.
Might I therefore familiarize you with just the first step in, no doubt, many, to avoid the Warp-Five Wedgie and Neon Nurple. To name just two debilitating, Gitmoesque forms of torture.
Yes, this is all part of a wonderfully batty new campaign for Burger King. Sheer genius, if you ask me. Even greater genius when you compare it with the painful bilge of the Red House furniture store.
Please, as you head into a new week, beware of any Kingons in your midst.
You'll remember the hilarious Burger King Whopper Sacrifice promotion that offered you some cheap piece of meat in a bun in exchange of getting rid of 10 of your most obsequious or obscure Facebook friends?
Well, Facebook has defriended it.
You want the deep and meaningful statement from Facebook? Here it is:
"We encourage creativity from developers and brands using Facebook Platform, but we also must ensure that applications follow users' expectations of privacy. This application facilitated activity that ran counter to user privacy by notifying people when a user removes a friend. We have reached out to the developer with suggested solutions. In the meantime, we are taking the necessary steps to assure the trust users have established on Facebook is maintained."
(Credit:
CC Nayrb7)
The supposed privacy breach consisted of those entirely disposable friends, people you never liked who requested you to be their friends, people for whom you felt sorry, receiving a notification that they had, indeed, been dumped for one-tenth of piece of meat in a bun.
If I were Facebook's sales staff (and I can tell you some funny stories about them, just not today) I would be wandering into Mr. Zuckerberg's office and giving him at least one-tenth of my mind.
Naturally, Crispin, Porter and Bogusky, the Whopper's (and, curiously, Microsoft's) ad agency, was already prepared. On the Burger King Web site, you can now express your feelings in a meaty manner. Yes, you can send an "Angry-gram." That would be a cute little animation that lets someone know "they annoy the hell out of you."
The less cute version of which might be, for some Whopper executives: "Burger off, Facebook."
It's not exactly the Pepsi Challenge.
A new teaser site, whoppervirgins.com, created by Crispin Porter Bogusky, claims to be the home of the world's "purest taste test."
Created on behalf of Crispin client Burger King, the site looks like it fell off the back of a National Geographic camel. It features people from remote Thai villages, deeper, darker Transylvania, and even the icy tundra of Greeenland.
These places were, apparently, chosen because burgers have never been seen or eaten there. In some cases, the people don't even know the word "burger." So, unlike every sad, biased human in the world, they are entirely unprejudiced when it comes to the difference between a Whopper and a Big Mac.
With a deep seriousness normally only reserved for political campaigns and dog food spots, the agency hired Stacey Peralta, director of the fine skateboarding movie Lords of Dogtown, to capture fast food history as it happens.
Of course, in the time we are being kept guessing as to the various possibilities of the test's results (I am sure many of you are betting on a Big Mac win), some small questions do tickle the back of the throat.
How can we be sure that the Big Macs in the ad even remotely resemble real Big Macs? The story is that the food was flown in. But it's not as if they had a culinary Ronald from McDonalds on the shoot, is it? So, for all we know, those poor Inuits might, in the guise of a Big Mac, have been fed horse.
The second question that rumbles the stomach is, well, did anyone regurgitate? Will we, in fact, in the interests of documentary veracity, be subjected to the sight of a virgin burger-eater in the act of bodily rejection?
In a development that I know will have stunned the creators, the teaser site has already caused much controversy. One commenter on gothamist.com was moved to write: "I don't think indigenous people should be used in that way to amuse a bored public that wants a sensation at any price."
Oh, but it's a recession. And Whoppers are very, very cheap.
And Sharon Atkins of the Institute of Daily Nutrition told New York's bastion of daily mental nutrition, the Daily News: "It's outrageous. What's next? Are we going to start taking guns out to some of these remote places and ask them which one they like better?"
Do we actually have any evidence that guns weren't used in this case? Purely for self-protection, of course.
Still, for all those who fear this will be like a new Borat movie directed by David Lean, at the very least this campaign will happily stir the highly important burger debate around and around our cogitative intestines.
Can these really be the same people who created "I'm a PC"?
This week sees the Cannes Advertising Festival. Where a lot of advertising people and clients drink themselves silly and whisper sweet everythings into each others' ears.
I love it myself. But, being on the creative side of the business, only when you have something in competition that has a chance of winning an award.
McDonalds has already achieved a victory this week, according to the eyeball counters at comScore.
Not in Cannes (yet), but on the web.
comScore announced this week that McDonalds enjoyed the unprecedented attention of almost 600 million eyeballs in March with their display ads. (that's two eyeballs per person, for the cyclops reading this)
Which means that the burger company comScored more than 33% of the share of voice of the Top Ten Quick Serve Restaurants.
For some reason, McDonalds enjoys almost fifteen times the number of display views as Burger King.
It appears that Ronald and his cohorts (who have been responsible for some truly excellent advertising over the last twenty years) have worked out that there are huge numbers of bored workers sitting in front of their computers getting hungry all morning.
So why not tickle their palate, which is probably being destroyed by those two bitter office staples- coffee and gossip.
(Credit:
Ryan McFarland (www.zieak.com))
The rumor is that the growth of display advertising on the web is markedly slowing, because clients are not seeing the results that they would wish.
Another rumor is that the reason for this slowdown is that people see the display ads, but then go to search ads to find the very best deal for the very desire the search ad has stimulated.
Let me toss out a subjective rumor.
The pop-up did a lot of damage. Banner ads that flashed to the point of vomit-inducing vertigo made it worse.
While TV audiences were used to seeing ads from the very beginning, and at least some of them were entertaining, people recoiled against some of the advertising detritus they were served online for years.
They preferred word of mouth that sent them to specific entertaining sites, like BurgerKing's brilliant subservientchicken.com or Philips' astoundingly deep shaveeverywhere.com.
People just aren't that fond of being interrupted online. They have things to do. Like seeing if Rumer Willis really can find a way to look like her Mom.
TV quickly became part of the domestic furniture, just another light you turned on when you came into the house.
Your laptop is a different being. Something more personal, something far more evocative of your private self.
Many display ads online are the equivalent of a father walking into his teenage daughter's room to check on what she's doing.
In the vernacular of my home town, the reaction they get is "Bog off."
McDonalds clearly feels that its dominating presence will bring rewards.
It will be interesting to see whether the company will see its heavy online activity slide more burgers into the nation's epiglottises.
Yes, there is a McDonalds in Cannes. On the main square where locals play boules. And just a few paces from the Palais des Festivals.
- prev
- 1
- next
