The Day a TV Ad Hacked Everyone's Living Room / Burger King "Google Home of The Whopper"

The problem

Back in 2017, the ad market built around voice assistants was projected to reach $19 billion by 2022. Against that backdrop, this campaign asked a provocative question: what happens if an ad hacks the technology instead of the other way around? As part of its "Connected Whopper" campaign, Burger King turned the constraint of a 15-second ad slot into an opportunity, building a script around the premise that there wasn't enough time to describe all the fresh ingredients—so Google Home would explain it instead. Google had no advance knowledge of the plan at all, and was reportedly unhappy that its own software had been hijacked without permission. At a time when brands were under growing pressure to play it safe, Burger King made exactly the opposite bet.

The insight

Someone at DAVID Miami said they had a hunch that anyone could stumble onto the same idea, so they rushed to shoot and release it. In fact, during the 2017 Super Bowl, a Google ad had accidentally triggered Google Home devices by mistake—and it was only a matter of time before someone who saw that thought, "what if we did that on purpose?" This was the first time anyone had used a voice assistant to effectively "extend" a TV commercial. Jury president Ted Lim called it "outstanding, outrageous and simply incredible." What shook the industry wasn't just the originality of the idea, but what it revealed: how fragile the technology really was, and how an "old" medium like TV advertising could throw a whole system into disarray.

The idea

The ad ran just 15 seconds. A Burger King employee says there isn't enough time to properly explain how great the Whopper is, then turns to the camera and says, "OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?" Any Google Home device in the room watching the ad would respond, and start reading aloud from the Whopper's Wikipedia page. Google blocked the voice command within a few hours, but Burger King and DAVID had anticipated this—they'd already prepared backup versions with different voices (female, robotic, high-pitched), and that same night, aired them again during Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel's shows. Once again, Google Home devices across America started talking during primetime, and headlines ran with "Burger King beats Google." Meanwhile, the Whopper's Wikipedia page became a target for trolls—it was edited 104 times, with additions like "cancer-causing," "rat meat and toenail clipping," and "medium-sized child," all of which Google Home would then read out loud. The shoot cost almost nothing, since it was just tacked onto an existing commercial shoot, and CMO Machado said the return on investment was essentially infinite.

What happened

The campaign generated 1.05 billion impressions and $135 million in earned media, making it the most successful campaign in the company's history. It won the Grand Prix in the Direct category at Cannes Lions 2017, and also took home Marketing Dive's Campaign of the Year award. In the judging, it reportedly beat McCann New York's "Fearless Girl" by just one vote. The campaign also picked up Gold and Silver Lions, plus a Gold in the Mobile category. It sparked weeks of debate over privacy concerns, technological vulnerability, and corporate ethics, dividing opinion. According to one study, 20% of Cannes Lions Grand Prix winners have been ads that people also labeled "annoying"—and this one fits right into that lineage.

Afterthought

What gets me about this one is the sheer nerve behind it. They knew Google would be angry, knew it would blow up online, knew the Wikipedia trolling was coming—and they went ahead anyway. And when Google shut it down, they didn't back off, they immediately fired back with a different version. Machado said something like: we'd already hit our goal, but we decided to keep having fun with it anyway. Advertising is supposed to be this mix of playfulness and a little bit of madness. Of course it's going to be divisive—an ad that everyone agrees on is boring anyway. The criticism that it "invaded people's living rooms" and the praise that it was "the first hacking ad ever" are both true at the same time. But either way, nobody forgot it. And honestly, that's the whole point.

Awards

• Cannes Lions Grand Prix 2017

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