January 18, 2009 by Matt Thomas
For those who don’t know, Burger King recently designed a Facebook app that offered users a free Whopper if they deleted ten of their friends. The idea was that everyone has several Facebook friends that they never see or barely even know who could be sacrificed for a burger quite easily. Once the ‘friends’ had been dropped they were sent a fairly mean message informing them that their erstwhile friend prefers one tenth of a burger to them. It’s all part of Burger King’s new angry image to fit in with their new range of burgers.
Unsurprisingly Facebook decided that this is not quite in the spirit of universal fellowship and brotherhood that they like to promote and pulled Burger King representatives in for what they called “Constructive talks.” The end result of this constructive discussion was that Burger King pulled the offending app.
Burger king however, are unlikely to be too annoyed, since the whole thing has given them a huge amount of free publicity. By simply building a vaguely controversial Facebook application they have managed to garner the kind of international publicity that would have cost them millions to get in a traditional way.
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