The key to success is believing in yourself. Especially when you want a Whopper.
— Burger King (@BurgerKing) April 12, 2017
It turns out the same advice applies when you want your brand’s name splashed across headlines and social media sites.
On Wednesday, the fast-food chain launched this commercial:
Owners of Google Home devices who saw the ad then got an unwelcome surprise.
Prompted by the phrase “O.K. Google,” the Google Home device beside the TV in the video lit up, searched the phrase on Wikipedia and stated the ingredients.But within hours of the ad’s release — and humorous edits to the Whopper Wikipedia page by mischievous users — tests from The Verge and BuzzFeed showed that the commercial had stopped activating the device.
The stunt lasted for only a few hours before Google blocked the commercial from activating its device—but within that time, many social media users turned to Wikipedia to edit the product’sdescription, forcing the site’s administrators to lock down the entry.
The New York Times reported:
Burger King, which did not work with Google on the ad, said Google appeared to make changes by Wednesday afternoon that stopped the commercial from waking the devices, in what amounted to an unusual form of corporate warfare in the living room. Google, which previously said it had not been consulted on the campaign, did not respond to requests for comment.
The move was a novel (if invasive) idea from Burger King’s marketing team—and not just because it used technology in a new way.
“The media, not your Google Home, has been hacked by Burger King,” The Verge’s James Bareham wrote. He then explained that most consumers with Google Home devices are the younger demographic who are early adopters. The percentage of them who also watch traditional TV—and who could have been affected by the commercial—is tiny.
The cadre of people sharing news about Burger King’s stunt, however, is not.
Bareham wrote:
It appears that its aim was to create a commercial that would tap into the target demographic’s concerns for intrusive advertising and invasion of their privacy. In turn, this would grab the attention of digital and traditional media who would write about those issues at length and generate tens of millions of dollars of free media and bucket loads of engagement. In that vein, Burger King’s campaign is a stunning success. It even managed to get around Google’s hasty block from letting the ad trigger Google Homes by releasing an alternate version during the prime-time slot it bought.
Fortune’s Jeff John Roberts agreed that “the whole episode was likely a stunt to gin up free publicity,” but he pointed out that marketing gimmicks such as this might become more common as more consumers buy smart devices for their homes.
Roberts wrote:
… But it also raises the question of what's to stop another company from trying the same thing—using a TV or radio ad to force a Google Home or an Echo (Amazon's competing device) to be co-opted into their marketing.The answer, from a legal perspective, appears to be that nothing can stop them.
"Google (and others) literally “opened the door" to this new hack when they put 'always on' devices in the home. We warned the FTC of the basic flaw in the architecture — it is not simply the owner that activates the device ... They didn't 'listen,'" Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Fortune by email.
What do you think of the marketing stunt, PR Daily readers?
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