1
2
3
4
"In what could be a sure sign of the Apocalypse, Burger King outsmarted Google" (New York Post). And that's how you can summarize Google Home of the Whopper, the campaign we did for Burger King.
The idea was simple, a 15-second spot would feature a Burger King server attempting to describe a Whopper and its fresh ingredients. But since he didn't have a whole lot of time, he ended by asking Google to complete that task by saying: “OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?”.
For anyone with a Google Home near their TV, that would trigger the device to begin reading the Wikipedia entry for the Whopper.
Before we aired the spot on TV we launched it online with PR, so people would talk about the idea. What we didn't know is that the early release of the PR would bring us some obstacles before the spot aired on TV:
1 - Google Home search result comes from Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is an open source. So as soon as we launched our spot online people started changing the Wikipedia entry for the Whopper, and they started listing the most weird and creative ingredients ever, such as medium sized child and a toe. Result: Wikipedia blocked the Whopper page with the original content.
2 - Google was not happy with our ad. They were so not-happy that 3 hours after we launched the spot online Google blocked our ad from triggering the device. Result: Instead of airing the original spot on TV later on that day, we aired a new version. On that new version we used a different take of the question, which led the question to trigger the devices. And we didn't stop there, in case that version didn't work, we also aired thee other versions of the spot with different voices.
So yes, we can say we outsmarted Google.
The production of this spot was fairly simple, but I can say it was one crazy day between launching the PR too early, having people changing the Wikipedia page and having to ship new versions that would trigger the device. But everything worked out in the end.