Chris Reed
Mar 30, 2013

Burger King’s new BOMB campaign blows up in its mouth

Burger King has always had a terrible reputation for creative. Their new advert damages the brand yet further and stretches the limits of taste to the limit.

Burger King’s new BOMB campaign blows up in its mouth

In the context of North Korea and South Korea/The United States of America’s nuclear sabre rattling Burger King have decided to create this advert. 

Yes that is a nuclear bomb going off. Why? Burger King have decided to create a campaign called BOMB and match the “creative idea” with an illustration of a nuclear bomb, not just any bomb, a nuclear bomb going off.

Why BOMB? Well if you follow the “creative” (and I really do use this word loosely) through they actually get BOMB from Bacon for B, Onion for O, Chips for….(no they couldn’t fit C into BOMB so they didn’t use the letter C …..), Mayo for M, BBQ Sauce for B not  BS for BOMBS or something else being with BS which is what this advert is.

And people wonder why creatives’ often get a bad reputation when you see work like this you do wonder what was going through the creative and marketing people’s head. What was the brief? What was the brainstorm that came up with this like?

I am not sure where this was created, I assume it’s a global campaign and therefore created in the US. Maybe they are oblivious to what is going on in the world.

Maybe because Korea v’s Korea is foreign news and US channels are notorious for only showing domestic news that the creative who designed this didn’t know what was going on….maybe they are just stupid and lack any imagination….

However as the cartoon, right, was in the New York Times I have to conclude it was pure ignorance and inability to empathise with the customer demographic or just laziness of the heighest order. 

As I live in Singapore and this advert was full page in the free newspaper Today and Korea v’s Korea has been a hot topic of conversation, and was front page news on the same day this advert went in and it has been constantly on TV news I am amazed that the Singapore/Asia office ran this advert.

It’s insensitive, tasteless and does nothing for the brand whatsoever apart from to emphaises how far behind their competitors they are in the creative as well as product sense.

Source:
Campaign Asia

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