Right-Half Chow

Whopper Virgins

I'm wondering what they'll think of next: first they deprive americans of their favourite burger, now they supply it to people who don't even grasp the burger-concept.

The film is here, and I'm pretty impressed at how 'respectful' it turned out to be. It's something completely different than Freakout, and judging by the amount of footage they have they could have cut it in a completely different way. It's nice to see how the crew reacted surprised and humbled by some of the events and interactions taking place.

As far as marketing success goes, I really think this will go a long way to gain them more credit outside of the US. Where Freakout reminded US citizens how good the Whopper actually was, this is more of statement about the general curiosity and the openness of the brand towards other cultures. Then again, it makes me feel like ordering a whopper, but there's still no Burger King to be found here...

Whopper Virgins - Preview

OhboyOhboyOhboy... Looks like another corker from Burger King coming our way. Check out Burger King's Whopper Virgins page and tremble with anticipation.

As a sane person and a reasonable lighthearted foodie, every fibre in my body should protest against this insane export of one of the USA's worst habits. But then I'm secretly a Whopper fan myself, and I'm hoping the film will be so great I'll throw away all my petty conscience issues in 5 days, 5 hours and 45 minutes.

Referring to my last post: Burger King is another typical example of a brand that's built a heritage which allows them all kinds of nifty things in other media, and make it just as clean as they want to make it. And naturally, people enter the conversation when you do stuff like this. Let's see how many YouTube spoofs this baby garners...

Are brands too clean?

Dave Cushman from FasterFuture interviewed Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody) on brands and branding a way back. I had the film stocked in my YouTube favourites and finally got around to look at it. During the interview Clay argues that brands often act too clean, which inhibits people from taking them and doing interesting stuff with them.

I think the idea is true for a lot of web stuff. But even then: getting people to play around with your brand on the web probably won't happen if you're not already attracting them on another platform. And looks and fascination play a bigger role there.

The whole idea of the web changing markets into conversations is too often used as an excuse to come up with something shoddy and hope people will make something of it. But if you look at the brands that really make it onto the web, you'll notice that it often means they did their homework really well. It kind of reminds me of the comment I wrote in response to this article (see bottom of linked page or below):

The problem is that you need to have a story first. And those tend to be monologues to start with. Nike can start conversations because they have established a story and a dramatic tension within their brand (empowering people to perform better than they normally do, to challenge themselves). If that story wasn't there in the first place, noone would even bother to get involved. The story about Tiger being 'that good' is one that has some mileage in it as well, so that makes it suitable for an EA rebuttal. without the EA lifelike connotation (which they exploit in may of their sports titles), this conversation would not make any sense. Fun, sure, but nothing added to the brand. I'm seeing far too many brands out there who start inane online initiatives to get consumers involved without having the slightest notion of what they are or what they should be in the first place. Resulting in desperate pleas for attention or irrelevant bandwagon jumping that only serves the clutter the online advertising realm is starting to suffer from. So please, before you start the conversation, ask yourself why people would want to talk to you. And it really doesn't matter if you're 'digital' or not to start with...

I'm sure Clays plea is not one for lazy marketing, but there are a lot of people out there who really take this as an excuse to start portraying themselves as branding experts. Thinking a brand through and spending some time getting it right is the only thing stopping us from being swamped with ill thought out work on every web page we visit before you can say 'user generated craphola'.