Whopper Sacrifice: Burger King’s Viral Widget

Written by Matthijs Roumen on January 12th, 2009 | 3 comments

Burger King isn’t an unfamiliar on viral grounds and has proven its viral creativity with previous campaigns like Whopper Freakout and Subservient Chicken. Now Burger King comes with another campaign which is targeting the social space: Whopper Sacrifice.

Burger King asks you to remove 10 people from your friendlist on Facebook in order to receive a free Whopper. It’s the first Facebook Application I come across in 2009 and makes a good start for this year!

Would you sacrifice a few friend for a free burger?

The Facebook application works really really simple. After installation, you can select some “friends” and begin removing. Instead of a normal removal, in which the defriending won’t be visible in any timeline, this application makes sure everybody sees you’ve just given up someone in trade for one tenth of a Whopper. The activity feed will show a line like: “Matthijs sacrificed Igor Beuker for a free Whopper”. This is a very smart part of the application, because by this action, the sacrifice will be visible to a lot of people.

As quickly as can see it from the action website statistics, thousands of friends are being removed every hour! And its not only abou the people who remove – or get removed – but also about the folks who view this process from the outside. The spectators that see it happen and get the message as well.

A nifty little detail in this application is that its in line with the prediction of Greg Verdino who shared his vision in the document of social media predictions for 2009. In his prediction, he told the readers that the quality of connections will be more important in the future then the number of connections. People will be connected to people they really really know, and care less about the numbers.

I believe this application can become a big succes. It has some good viral aspects. Its definatly remarkable and different from many other applications, its bounded to a big name, the user gets something in return and it gives a clear message: The Whopper is worth the sacrifice of 10 friends. How would you judge this Facebook application?

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3 Comments

• Burger King’s most interesting viral campaign so far! | Kristofer Mencák says:

  January 12, 2009 at 18:34

  [...] and ViralBlog has also written about the campaign, among [...]

  Reply
• Igor Beuker says:

  January 13, 2009 at 00:18

  Burger King: King of Virals!

  Strange that not more brands are able to copy BK’s smart strategic approach. Or would it be the rebellious DNA of the BK brand that is their key differentiator?

  Cheers

  Igor

  Reply
• Hugo Ekström says:

  January 16, 2009 at 10:33

  It seems facebook did not like the whopper sacrifice application. They´ve shut it down. Also – check out the “Whopper Sacrifice Network” and “Petition to Re-Enable Whopper Sacrifice-group” on Facebook.

  Viral at its best!

  /Hugo

  Reply