The Whopper Detour
The deal that only worked when you were standing inside a McDonald's.
The insight
Plenty of people had the Burger King app. Almost nobody opened it. Coupon apps are the junk drawer of your phone: downloaded once for a deal, then left to rot behind the weather widget. The problem was never the offer, it was the trigger. People needed a reason to open the thing that was too good, and too strange, to ignore.
And where is a hungry person guaranteed to be thinking about fast food? Already standing in a fast-food line. Usually a competitor's.
The idea
Sell a Whopper for one cent, but only unlock it when the customer is physically inside a McDonald's. Turn your rival's restaurants into your billboard, your point of sale, and the punchline, all at once. To buy the cheapest Whopper in history, you first had to go and stand in enemy territory.
How it works
FCB rebuilt the Burger King app and geofenced every McDonald's in America, roughly 14,000 of them. Walk within about 600 feet of the golden arches, open the app, and it flips into Detour mode. Order your 1-cent Whopper, then get routed back out of McDonald's to the nearest BK to collect it.
It ran nine days. The mechanic did three jobs at once: it weaponised location, it generated the trolling headlines, and it gave people a genuinely compelling reason to finally open an app they had been ignoring for years.
The Stupid/Smart of it
Stupid: spend your marketing budget driving hungry customers into your biggest competitor's restaurants. On a slide, it reads like sabotage.
Smart: the detour was the media buy. McDonald's own footprint became free reach, the absurdity paid for the earned press, and the 1-cent price gave people a real reason to download, open, and keep the app. A gag on the surface, a permanent owned channel underneath.
Why we love it
It is the rare stunt where the joke and the business goal are the same move. The trolling got the headlines, but the actual prize was app installs and first-party data, and the idea delivered both because it was outrageous, not in spite of it. The best distribution hack is a creative idea people cannot help but act on.
The numbers
It also put Burger King at number one in the App Store, and drove the highest store-visit numbers the chain had seen in four years.
Awards
Three Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2019
Who made it
Client: Burger King
Global CMO: Fernando Machado
Head of Global Brand Marketing: Marcelo Pascoa
Agency: FCB New York
Chief Creative Officer: Ari Halper
Group Creative Director: Gabriel Schmitt
Art Directors: Alex Sprouse, Akos Papp
Copy (ACD): Laszlo Szloboda
Ran: December 2018, United States
Sources: Adweek (Direct GP) · Adweek (Titanium GP) · Ad Age · D&AD · Ads of the World (credits)
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