12.13.08
Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s recent campaign for Burger King made my skin crawl a little. I don’t eat fast food and neither does my wife. I quit eating it in my teens and just never went back to it. I need a french fry fix like any other guy from time to time but usually get it at a regular restaurant. I worked at McDonalds when I was in highschool, and I used to sneak into the stock room and look for ingredient lists to see what they actually put in the food. It isn’t even food when it boils down to it. It is more like something that is engineered in a way that it becomes just a taste experience with zero nutritional value. I also have my own theories on how eating stuff like that might give you cancer, not to mention diabetes, so I just started steering clear of it all together. I wish I could say the same for alcohol but I do have some vices. Damn you whiskey.
Anyway, this campaign is raising eyebrows all over and really getting to some people. I honestly think that is the whole point and that reaction is the whole reason for the campaign and is the campaign. Otherwise I wouldn’t even be writing about it here. I just think it is exploitive frankly. But advertising is sometimes exploitive when it needs to be. If anything I am sure it will make some people curious just how good a whopper tastes. Personally I could care less because I am still not going to eat one and after so many years (probably something like 12-14 years now). I honestly can’t remember what they taste like, nor do I have any craving for one, so seeing someone eat one doesn’t even make me hungry.
It does strike me as sad though that a business and just people in general would spend all that money and go all that way to do something like this. I am sure millions were spent on this campaign and is something like this worth it?
I don’t know. It just makes me sad. What do you think and how does it make you feel?
