What is up with Burger King’s Whopper Virgins campaign? More to the point, why is the company devoting a Web microsite to a seven-minute documentary about its Whopper v. Big Mac taste testing?
If you don’t know about this exercise, here’s the clever twist. They’re testing in picturesque locations where quaint and colorful denizens, as the on-camera commentators point out, have never even seen a hamburger. (Imagine their response to the modern focus group facilities, complete with one-way glass, where one sequence in the documentary was shot. We don’t get to see the locals’ take on that.)
The impenetrable intent of the campaign aside, all the staged trappings of authenticity—the colorful local garb, the cheerful, open-hearted natives, the earnest commentary on incompatibilities in propane valves--makes me more than a little uncomfortable. For me it embodies the distasteful flip side of globalism, akin to those authentic but sterilized tourist junkets like guided Yak caravans in Mongolia.
I know I should lighten up. I may be missing the point. This could be an ironic send-up of reality TV and mass advertising’s taste test clichés—with the snarky, patronizing title cleverly undercutting the faux-realistic content, and where the globe-probing competition ends in, yes, patient (!) viewers, a virtual dead heat between fast food contenders.
Fortified with a bracing dose of historical perspective, I can handle Hope, Crosby, or Lou Costello steeped in a bubbling cauldron while boot-blacked extras dance around and wave their feathered spears. But this? Not so much.
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