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"?
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