The Tragedy of Modern Marketing: Burger King and Google Home

Burger King has had an idea: the US fast food chain has come up with a prime-time advertisement in which a voice asks: “OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?” The idea being to prompt Google Home, the voice assistant present in several million US homes, to answer the question by reading the Wikipedia article about said product. The company has gone even further: it has edited the corresponding Wikipedia article so it is practically an advertisement.

Google, which was not consulted, has already disabled its device response to the question asked in the advertisement, while the Wikipedia article has been reverted to its previous version and editing blocked.

But it is worth considering the mad, bad and unsustainable thinking of company that could come up with such a scheme. To deliberately interfere with a device that millions of people have in their homes so they can hear about the characteristics of a product, based on information it has edited — or rather sabotaged from an encyclopedia that expressly states it should not be used as a marketing vehicle.

Sadly, Burger King is not the first company to come up such an idea: Google itself already tried to introduce into its device a message that, on the day of the release of the new version of “Beauty and the Beast” included suggesting going to see the movie when asked by users about their day’s agenda.

So far, such incidents have only happened by accident, such as when a news reader triggered some Amazon Echo devices to try to order a doll’s house. That this is now being done intentionally proves two things: one, that we are using, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, technologies that are susceptible to manipulation, sabotage or misuse, sometimes generating effects that can be difficult to predict. Two, that marketing managers can be so stupid as to come up with campaigns that are not only intrusive and likely to annoy their customers, but are completely unsustainable. It does not seem to have occurred to Burger King that other brands might try the same trick. In marketing circles, whoever came up with the idea will be praised for being so witty, for transgressing and for attracting a lot of media coverage. But the simple truth is that the person responsible is an idiot who should be sacked for annoying customers and has made many people wonder if their personal assistant will be filled from now on with junk ads.

Marketing today seems to be about ruining the value proposition of something even before we’ve started using it. We accept phone calls from companies using carefully worded arguments that rely on our good manners to try to sell us things we do not want to buy. It has become normal to us to systematically reject any unidentified call, as if it were logical that these companies had the “right” to bother us and bother us in that way. Every day, armies of door-to-door sales people turn up uninvited at our homes trying to get us to switch gas or electricity supplier, usually only managing to dupe the elderly and uninformed. Why consider the sustainability of the relationship with the client, if he or she is old and will die soon anyway?

These practices, devoid of ethics, such as outbound and door-to-door telephone sales should be prohibited without exception, while consumers with a minimum of common sense should boycott these companies. But there we are: the moron of a marketing director at Burger King is set for celebrity status and may even win a prize. Congratulations, champ. Keep it up.

(En español, aquí)