BURGER KING | NONARTIFICAL MEXICO | 2022
Shot on the street, in a country where 49% feel ads aren't about them / BURGER KING "NONARTIFICAL MEXICO"
No models, no hair and makeup, no beautiful locations. Just black-and-white photos of ordinary people on Mexican streets, biting into a burger. Those photos became billboards — and even made it into a museum.
The problem
49% of people in Mexico said they couldn't see themselves in advertising. The casting, the scenery — everything was too idealized, too far from everyday life. Burger King was trying to figure out how to talk about its "clean menu," made without preservatives or artificial coloring.
The insight
If you strip the artificial stuff out of the product, why not strip it out of the advertising too? That's really all it was. Photograph ordinary people — the kind who never show up in magazines or on TV. Nobody had done that before.
The idea
A street photographer spent two months traveling around Mexico. Inside cars, at workplaces, on street corners. Young people, pregnant women, people without shirts on — all captured in black and white at the exact moment they bit into a Burger King burger. The tagline: "Lo real sabe mejor" (Real tastes better). These photos became billboards across the city, and were even exhibited at a photography museum in Mexico City.
What happened
Brand awareness reached 95%, with a 98% positive response, and sales rose 36.7%. The campaign won three Golds at Cannes 2022. Where "Moldy Whopper" used a rotting burger to show there were no preservatives, this campaign delivered the same message through real, human images — the exact opposite approach.
Afterthought
Cutting through a market full of artificial advertising with photos that are anything but artificial. It sounds like a contradiction, but I think it's about as honest as advertising gets. The moment these photos went into a museum, they stopped being ads. And maybe that's exactly why they worked so well as ads.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2022
