Do you “love” Burger King Whoppers more than 10 of your Facebook friends? Burger King is hoping you do!

Burger King like most companies are jumping on the social media/viral marketing train to promote their product. The creative powerhouse at Crispin Porter + Bogusky (700 employees) who was recently named 2008 Agency of the Year by Creativity helped them launch the Whopper Sacrifice campaign. With this new Facebook application Whopper Sacrifice, I think they are missing the mark on what social media marketing is really about. You are rewarded a free Whopper (coupon) for deleting 10 Facebook friends. When you delete a friend, a public update is posted to your wall stating “Johnny sacrificed Bob for a free burger…”

WALK-THROUGH

Let me walk you through the step of using this Whopper Sacrifice.

Step 1 - Select a friend

Step 2 - Delete your friend

Step 3 - Your friend is sacrificed (animated photo burning)

Step 4 - Wall notification of deletion (auto posts)

I have not deleted 10 friends (not going to) so I am not aware of what happens once the 10th friend is deleted. I did notice that after you deleted a friend, you can add the friend back and the Whopper Sacrifice still counts that person as deleted (an app bug).

NOTE: Learned that it takes 2 weeks to receive the coupon in the mail.

ROI (Financial Costs)

While this campaign offers a shock factor as do many Burger King campaigns (creepy BK commercials), I can’t see this campaign offering a high return on investment (ROI) for the company and the user. First you take the cost of development, marketing, and infrastructure then you add the cost to the user (time & credibility). Most creative agencies charge big dollars for their services, so let’s try to breakdown the cost.

Guesstimate on Campaign Costs (if fully committed to campaign)

By Agency (CPB)
$85,000 (finger in the wind estimate)
Charged to client (Burger King)
- not only costs of “project”, also include costs of post maintenance, and infrastructure

• Strategies & Planning (cost of man hours)
• Project Management
• Design (web and print)
• Marketing (all forms)
• Development (web and interactive)
• Quality Assurance
• Infrastructure
• Post Launch Maintenance

By Client (Burger King)
$75,000 (finger in the wind estimate)
Cost of employee time/infrastructure/internal processes/materials

• Strategies & Planning (cost of man hours)
• Executive Approvals
• Marketing Collaboration
• IT Collaboration
• Quality Assurance
• Marketing (all forms)
• Sales Systems Integration
• Internal Corporate Marketing
• Internal Training (Marketing, Sales, IT)
• Design of coupon (print)
• Shipping and Handling of coupon (highest cost)
• Shipping Operations
• Franchisee Marketing
• Franchisee Training (owners and staff)
• Franchisee Print Collateral
• Public Relations

So, this is a guessing estimate of $160,000+ in total costs of ownership (TCO) for this campaign. If each coupon is worth to Burger King’s operating costs is worth .50 cents (out of pocket expenses), that’s $132,500 given way. If a user comes into the BK store most likely they’ll buy a soda and fries, let’s now value a coupon at $2.50 with a net profit back to BK of $1.25, after corporate expenses, an actual profit of .90 cents per coupon. It would take 294,444 coupons for Burger King to break even. According to their Facebook application website, 54,000+ friends have been scarified, resulting in 5,400 coupons. This is a 1.83% ROI ($0.90 profit per coupon). I’ll spare you the details of how long it would take for BK to get to a 101% ROI (100% = break even).

“WHY?”

Earlier I stated this campaign is missing the mark on social media campaigns. With Facebook most users are proud of their numbers of friends. I’ve been hearing a lot of people brag about their numbers of friends. While most friends are not actually “Friends.” On my Facebook profile I have 310 friends and I would say 10% are family, 25% are active “Friends”, 25% are old Friends (high school/college), 30% are business acquaintances, and 10% are Misc. That leaves me with only 31 people to delete (from the Misc group). Ok, that gives me the option to gain 3 free Whopper coupons. If a Whopper is valued at $2.99, that’s $9 in my pocket.

I ran the concept of deleting 10 friends for a Whopper by Marketers, Engineers, and even people who are not on Facebook and all have asked “Why?” One person said it was “Mean.” This is where we get into the ROI for the Facebook user. The biggest flaw with this campaign is posting to the users wall that John Doe deleted Jane Doe. While I may have earned $9 (by deleting 30 friends) some friends and business colleagues will see I “deleted” a friend, 10+ in all without really knowing why. The first impression is, “for a Whopper?”

I could only imagine that getting “Whopper Deleted” is like being the last person picked in Dodgeball. What will be the next Facebook application that asked you to delete a friend? How about deleting a Facebook friend who has a profile but never updates it (plenty of those) or a Facebook user that still has the default blank face as their profile picture.

REAL ROI (Industry Buzz)

I clearly pointed out the financial ROI for this campaign is flawed. The real ROI is in brand marketing and awareness. Before I heard of Whopper Sacrifice I was unaware of Crispin Porter + Bogusky and their reputation of pushing edgy campaigns. It also brought much discussion and opinions to the blogoshere on the strategy of deleting a Facebook friend. Getting us bloggers simply to write anything on this (as I am) is ROI, …priceless.

The real ROI is in brand marketing and awareness

“Whopper Sacrifice” search results (exact match) as of 01/09/2008 11:30 AM.

• Technorati (28)
• Digg (0)
• Google Web Search (5,130)
• Google News Search (81)
• Google Blog Search (2,263)
• Twitter Search (click to see)

Here are some Twitter comments.

There is no doubt that there is a buzz about Whopper Sacrifice though how many people are actually cutting 10 friends. Just about everyone I know that did not hear of Whopper Sacrifice, went and installed the applications and deleted 1 or 2 friends though did not actually cut 10. It was curiosity that many people are cutting friends, curiosity on what is this edgy campaign all about.

You can also consider a great ROI on this campaign is that now Burger King has direct access to a user’s backend Facebook information. When a user installs a Facebook application, the application owner can dig into the user’s list of friends, photos, posts, profile information, history, and other general information. To an advertiser, this is golden!

The obvious conclusions is that losing (intentionally deleting) 10 Facebook friends worth $2.99 and coming across somewhat mean for a measly burger? This campaign is probably better served (no pun intended) on MySpace which is notorious for people having lots of randoms friends. I would recommend giving a coupon (lesser value) to the friend that was deleted.