Whopper Sacrifice

» see whoppersacrifice.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Whopper Sacrifice opened on 5 January 2009 and ran for ten days. It was a Facebook application, built for Burger King by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, and the offer was blunt: delete ten people from your friends list and collect a coupon for a free Angry Whopper. The page title said the whole thing out loud, "Sacrifice 10 friends from Facebook for a free WHOPPER."

In January 2009 the Turkish internet was still finishing its migration off MSN Messenger, and Facebook here was something your younger cousins had joined before you did. An American coupon redeemable at an American drive-through, wrapped in a Facebook app, had no route to me at all. What traveled was the number, because the number was startling and got written up everywhere.

By the time the app was switched off, 233,906 friendships had been ended through it. Around 23,000 of the 25,000 available coupons had gone out, which works out at roughly thirty-seven cents of sandwich per discarded person, or about a tenth of what the sandwich actually cost.

~ the chronicle ~

~ ten friends per sandwich ~

The mechanic had a counter. You picked people off your list and the app tracked your progress toward ten. Each deletion was staged as a small ceremony: the sacrificed friend's profile photo appeared and burned away, captioned with the line "YOU LIKE [NAME], YOU LOVE THE WHOPPER." Nothing about it was subtle, and the staging is why people played along rather than quietly unfriending anyone as usual.

The second half of the mechanic is what killed it. When you sacrificed someone, that person got told. A notification went out naming both of you and explaining that one had been exchanged for a hamburger. On Facebook in 2009 this was new information in the strict sense, because the platform deliberately did not tell anyone when they had been dropped, and still does not.

~ what facebook would not allow ~

Facebook asked Crispin Porter + Bogusky more than once to turn the notifications off. The agency kept them running, and the requests escalated into a cease and desist. On Wednesday 14 January 2009 Facebook disabled the feature, and Burger King withdrew the campaign the following day, leaving the coupon offer dead with about 2,000 of its coupons unclaimed.

The agency's own position afterward was that the promotion had nearly run its course anyway, since the coupon pool was almost exhausted. Whoppersacrifice.com stayed up for a few weeks, shrank to a parked page, and now lands on a marketing blog unrelated to the campaign or the company. The app survives as a statistic in somebody else's slide deck about virality, usually without the detail that Facebook had to issue a legal demand to stop it.

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