The Value of a Facebook Friend? About 37 Cents
UPDATE 4:50 P.M.:
This post has been updated to include a response from Facebook regarding the Whopper Sacrifice campaign.
You may not be able to get a coupon for a digital TV converter box, but if you're experiencing a bit of bloat on your Facebook friend list, you can snag a free burger by dropping 10 of your Facebook friends, courtesy of Burger King.
That's the gist of Whopper Sacrifice, an advertising campaign from Burger King to promote a new version of the company's flagship sandwich called the Angry Whopper. To earn their free burger, users download the Whopper Sacrifice Facebook application and dump 10 unlucky friends deemed to be unworthy of their weight in beef. After completing the purge, users are prompted to enter their addresses and the coupons are sent out via snail mail.
The application sends a note to each of the banished friends, bluntly alerting them that they were abandoned for a free hamburger.
Brian Gies, vice president of marketing for the fast-food chain, said the company had been eyeing Facebook as a marketing platform but wanted to use it in a way that was somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
"Facebook is an amazing way to keep current with your friends, but it's becoming more of a popularity contest with how many friends you have as the barometer," said Mr. Gies. "We wanted to be part of its momentum and growth, but in an inverse way."
Mr. Gies said he wasn't worried about offending anyone with the campaign. "Before this, there was no polite way to de-friend someone. And ultimately, the reward is a Whopper."
It may seem like a counterintuitive marketing strategy, but Rob Reilly, co-executive creative director of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency behind the stunt, said it's a way to use the Web to capture a lot more attention for the same advertising dollars.
"Choosing 10 people can take a lot of time," said Mr. Reilly. "There's at least an hour's worth of people's eyes on your brand. Maybe you can't quantify those numbers, but they do add up."
Besides, he added, "we aren't giving the burgers away -– you have to sacrifice. You are paying for it but the currency is different."
What price is Burger King placing on a Facebook friendship? At a suggested retail price of $3.69 for the Angry Whopper sandwich, customers are trading each deleted friend for about 37 cents' worth of bun and beef.
Crispin Porter + Bogusky is also behind the company's recent round of quirky marketing stunts, including Flame, a hamburger-scented body spray, and Whopper Virgins, a series of blind taste tests between Whoppers and McDonald's Big Macs in remote areas like Thailand and Romania.
The agency also deployed the Whopper Freakout, in which various restaurants around the United States removed the signature snack from their menu and videotaped customer responses. The best responses were released as commercials.
There's certainly been no shortage of Facebookers willing to slim down their friend lists while fattening their bellies. Since the application became available in late December, nearly 200,000 Facebookers have been de-friended for the sake of a hamburger. That amounts to more than 20,000 coupons for free Whoppers.
Facebook declined to comment on the campaign.
The promotion is limited to one coupon per Facebook user, and the supplies are capped at 25,000 burgers — equivalent to 250,000 sacrificed friends. Mr. Gies said the company may consider expanding the offer if demand continues to rise.
For Willie Vanderheyden, 31, a graduate student in Missouri with more than 200 Facebook friends, the free burger seemed like a fair trade for purging his address book.
"It's a good excuse to get rid of old girlfriends and their families on my account and get a Whopper out of it," he said in a phone interview. "There are so many people on Facebook that I haven't talked to in a long time that getting rid of 10 of them who are pretty much meaningless in my daily life isn't going to be a big deal."
But in a follow-up e-mail message a few hours later, Mr. Vanderheyden found that eliminating friends was harder than he thought. He said he got stuck at seven. "It's not like I hate any of these people," he wrote. "The question is: Do I like one-tenth of a Whopper more than the information these people could one day post on Facebook?"
Emily Koster, a 25-year-old legal assistant and self-described vegetarian in Sacramento, Calif., said she had no such qualms.
Ms. Koster, who currently has more than 400 Facebook friends, said she wasn't worried about any residual awkward encounters among those she selects to delete. "I look at it this way — the upset over any confrontation is greatly outweighed by the pleasure I'm going to get when they actually admit they're upset over Facebook," she said in an e-mail message.
She added in a later note, "The relationships will be easily reparable. Chances are, they'll still be my friend on MySpace."
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