On the heels of its brilliant anti-bullying spot last year, Burger King has found another cause it can get behind, and promote with a clever in-store stunt—net neutrality.
In December, you’ll recall, the FCC repealed net neutrality rules that regulated businesses that provide internet access to consumers—opening the door for broadband providers to potentially charge more for better internet speed or higher-quality service.
Net neutrality is a complicated topic to explain, though. Which is where Burger King came in with a meaty metaphor. It set up a social experiment at a BK location—with a hidden-camera setup not unlike that of the anti-bullying spot—and taught Whopper buyers a memorable lesson.
Below, see how real customers reacted to being charged more for the same quick-serve Whopper—or, for the regular price, having to wait longer for a Whopper as BK employees intentionally, and seemingly pointlessly, slow down their service.
David Miami, the agency behind so many clever BK campaigns in recent years, made the new spot. It’s very different than the “Bullying Jr.” PSA, but in some ways works similarly.
In place of the more emotional and poignant ending of that earlier spot, here we get a more plainly hostile vibe from the patrons—which fits the issue at hand better. If you were served a mashed-up burger, you’d be mostly confused; if you’re openly denied good service, you’d probably get annoyed pretty quickly.
There’s plenty of cursing in between the baffled looks; a few patrons even make a move to snatch their Whopper away from the BK employees. There’s a dose of “Whopper Freakout” in here, and you get the sense that the stunt could easily have turned violent—thankfully, it didn’t.
The pricing board that they showed customers is great, too—with MBPS, referring to megabytes per second in webspeak, changed to mean “making burgers per second.”
SCREENCHOW 