So I’m reading La Vida Locavore, and Jill Richardson has a post up about Burger King’s new marketing campaign:

Now, if you ditch 10 [Facebook] friends, they’ll give you a free burger. Then they send your ex-friends a message saying you like Whoppers better than you like them. Gross.

It sounded so weird that I followed her link to this article from Adweek. Sure enough, it’s a real story and not satire from The Onion:

The fast-food chain has released the Whopper Sacrifice application on Facebook. The app rewards people with a coupon for BK’s signature burger when they cull 10 friends. Each time a friend is excommunicated, the application sends a notification to the banished party via Facebook’s news feed explaining that the user’s love for the unlucky soul is less than his or her zeal for the Whopper. […]

“We thought there could be some fun there, removing some of these people who are friends [but] not necessarily] best friends,” said Jeff Benjamin, executive interactive creative director at Crispin, and friend to 736 on Facebook. “It’s asking the question of which love is bigger, your love for your friends or your love for the Whopper,” he said.

The app also adds a box to user profile pages charting their progress toward the free burger with the line, “Who will be the next to go?”

The application is available on Facebook and at WhopperSacrifice.com.

This concept strikes me as bizarre. I don’t know whether that’s because I am not a Facebook person, because I’m older than the demographic they are targeting, or because I haven’t eaten at Burger King in who knows how many years.

Are excess friends that big a problem on Facebook? Is a Whopper that desirable? It seems so unappetizing.

Jill reminds us that Burger King has had other unusual marketing campaigns lately, namely a meat-scented Burger King fragrance, ads featuring “Whopper Virgins” from cultures where fast food is unknown, and a series of YouTube videos

of people eating the “Octo Stacker” – a burger made with 2 buns, 8 patties, 9 pieces of cheese and 16 pieces of bacon.

Seriously, who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?

UPDATE: Thanks to ragbrai08 for pointing me to this Washington Post article. After “233,906 friends were removed by 82,771 people in less than a week,” Facebook shut down this application because it supposedly “facilitated activity that ran counter to user privacy […].”

For the record, Crispin Porter + Bogusky were the ad wizards who came up with this one. Clearly they were tapping into real potential to generate buzz for Burger King. Go figure.

I think we can all agree that Barack Obama’s campaign has employed phenomenal marketing and branding.

I wonder whether the new seal they put on his podium during a speech in Chicago on Friday is going a bit far, though.

Click the link to view the seal. An Associated Press blurb notes:

A new seal debuted on Obama’s podium Friday, sporting iconography used in the U.S. presidential seal, the blue background, the eagle clutching arrows on left and olive branch on right, but with symbolic differences. Instead of the Latin ‘E pluribus unum’ (Out of many, one), Obama’s says ‘Vero possumus’, rough Latin for ‘Yes, we can.’ Instead of ‘Seal of the President of the United States’, Obama’s Web site address is listed. And instead of a shield, Obama’s eagle wears his ‘O’ campaign logo with a rising sun representing hope ahead.

I know it’s important for a candidate to look presidential, and I think putting his website address where all the cameras will catch it is a good idea. But I don’t know about using the presidential eagle, and I would particularly question putting his sunrise “O” in the middle of the eagle.

Obama has gotten plenty of traction from the larger-than-life image his campaign has helped to cultivate, but does this seal seem a bit presumptuous to you? I think his campaign imagery should be emphasizing his ability to relate to real people and their problems.

Incidentally, Mr. desmoinesdem says there is no word for “yes” in Latin, but I’ll take the AP’s word for it that the Latin words on the Obama seal could be roughly translated as “Yes, we can.”

To my mind, the “Yes, we can” slogan should only be used for a big political rally, when Obama is mostly speaking to his own supporters. If he is giving a policy address, I wouldn’t put “Yes, we can” front and center, because I don’t think that helps him with people who are not already backing him.

I think that when he gives a speech, the sign on his podium should just have a simple slogan in English, plus the website address.

Is anyone out there a marketing specialist? What do you think of the seal?

UPDATE: Daily Kos user robertacker13 sparked quite the flamewar with this diary: Call Obama, get rid of the seal