‘Whopper Sacrifice’ De-Friended on Facebook

So much for sacrificing your Facebook friends for a free hamburger.

Burger King has shut off the grill on Whopper Sacrifice, a popular Facebook application that offered users a coupon for a free Burger King sandwich if they dumped 10 of their Facebook friends.

Whopper

A spokeswoman for Burger King said the company elected to discontinue the campaign Wednesday after Facebook asked developers to tweak one of the main features.

As Facebookers deleted the 10 unlucky friends deemed to be worth trading for 37 cents’ worth of fast food, the application sent a humorous notification to each of the banished friends, bluntly alerting them that they were abandoned for a free hamburger. The messages were similar to the alerts received when a Facebook friend is added or a comment is posted to a user’s message board.

A Facebook spokesman said the company was concerned the de-friending notification would disrupt users’ privacy expectations. Typically, no notification is sent when a Facebook user removes a friend.

The spokesman did not say whether a specific complaint prompted Facebook’s request that Burger King remove that particular aspect of the Whopper Sacrifice.

But rather than make the necessary changes, Burger King terminated the campaign altogether.

“While Facebook was a great sport, they did ask for changes that would have resulted in a different approach to our application, counter to what we developed,” Burger King said in a statement. “Ultimately, based on philosophical differences, we decided to conclude the campaign and chose to ‘sacrifice’ the application.”

Before Burger King pulled the campaign, there had been no shortage of Facebookers willing to slim down their friend lists while fattening their bellies. Nearly 234,000 Facebookers were de-friended for the sake of a hamburger. That amounted to more than 23,000 coupons for free Whoppers. Participants who deleted 10 friends before the application was closed down will still receive their coupons via snail mail.

In an interview last week, Brian Gies, vice president for marketing for the fast-food chain, said Burger King intended to limit the promotion to 25,000 Whopper coupons.

The company said Thursday that it had no plans to introduce new versions of the campaign on any other social networking site.

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Edna St. Vincent Millay put it best in her sonnet “Love is not all”
“I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.”

Nice…this sums up our country. We’re as loyal as the next $1 cheeseburger. Man, at least 23,000 people suck.

How mean spirited can you be! The marketing team at BK who thought of this promotion should be de-clawed and de-friended. As for Facebook – well it is another reason I will not sign up for it even though my friends keep telling me I should. This just proves why I should not. They are willing to trade someone’s privacy for free publicity.

Keep it.

Whatever. Just pick 10 friends who can take a joke, sacrifice them, then add them right back. Not rocket science people.

where is the wittiness in this advertising?
where is the contribution to the greater good?
looks like Burger King generated 234,000 spam emails

oh get a life people. I don’t have a lot of friends on FB but even the ones i have don’t bother to reach out to me (and vice-versa) if you’re not going to stay in touch with someone why bother keeping them as friends? Just to feed your giant egos? at least i’m getting something out of them

get over it. a virtual friendship just can’t compare to warm beef in your mouth. over-seriousness is more of a problem in this country than the idiocy that is facebook.

be serious about africa, and don’t worry about burgers.

Bitters: I thought the same thing. Pick your best friends and have a laugh, get a burger, and re-friend them.

Lame.

This promotion was easy to game, and I’ll be that’s the reason BK dropped it. I can envision a situation where I notify 10 friends that I’m “de-friending” them to get a free hamburger, then “re-friending” them a day or two later. If enough people did this it would crash Burger King’s silly promotion.

Facebook typically does not send updates when a person is de-friended. That’s because kids were orchestrating dumping sprees on people they sought to bully. One day, a teen would have dozen of new friends. The next he or she would have a long list of people who had blocked him or her. Pretty nasty stuff. I try to stick to the news and porn sites.

Burger King should be ashamed of itself for it’s cruelty and desreves to be punished in some manner-not a child or people friendly company who just gave their competitors a boost-those 23,000 demonstrate they could be cruel friends and I don’t think it was for the hamburger,either.

I’m going to buy 10 whoppers as soon as I get home. Brilliance like this deserves support.

I have plenty of Facebook friends I’ve been meaning to get rid of anyway, simply because I haven’t spoken to them in years. Why shouldn’t I get a free burger out of it, given the chance?

That said, I’ve always appreciated that Facebook doesn’t notify anyone when they are de-friended. I do think it’s mean-spirited to send them notification.

fyi josh, tom, and randy b. goode. sorry you had to find out like this, but you are no longer a fb friend of mine.

I think promotion was actually not the worse idea in the world.

I’d dump my wife in a heartbeat–on Facebook–for free food.

Then I’d probably refriend her later on.

Now this is just stright up funny if you ask me!!

The whole point of the ad was the 10 people getting the notice – they laugh at their “friends” dedication to BK. Maybe they’ll re-friend, maybe not, who really cares. Without the notice, why would BK want to hand out free coupons?

BK or facebook? hmmm. tough choice. I know, neither one.

Congrats to CP+B for yet another amusing and unquestionably attention-getting BK promotion.

A relatively small amount of creative and development work is yielding buzz in all kinds of locations, without (I bet) much spend on media.

Even cancelling this campaign gets attention; laughable whinging about the “cruelty” of this campaign helps keep BK’s name in the air.

The ‘privacy’ feature in question has always been for the sake of the person who was doing the defriending, not the person who was being defriended. Just as users can send messages to someone immediately after they de-friend them, they should be allowed to send notification immediately after.

The opposite (getting a notification when anyone de-friends you) is what breaks privacy, because you aren’t supposed to immediately know when someone else de-friends you. Unless they want to tell you themselves. And, they can do that through the burger app.

Facebook just likes to exert control over any application that pushes boundaries, as it has shown with the latest Palestine/Israel applications that have grown popular.

Is anyone else uncomfortable with that?

wake up people. bk gets to send every defriended user a bk advertisement with no work or cost. the whole point is to get bk’s name and brand in front of as many folks as possible. it capitalizes on fb crowd mentality: “hey look, joe’s eating at bk (by dumping me) maybe i’ll do the same (and buy a drink and fries while i am there). smart work by bk whether you agree with it or not

It was a great ad campaign Very Funny!

Great campaigns are ones that people remember.

Humour is good!

Go Whopper! LOL

Honestly, is a BK-quality burger worth the effort of un- and re- friending mere acquaintances even? Explanatiion: “I was hungry?” For the loss. Of time.

I miss my CB radio where we could yell insults at one another in real time. Now that was knee-slapping fun.

Hmm, would I trade ‘facebook friends’ for a piece of pesticide and additive laden piece of psychotically butchered animal mixed with soy? Hmm… Anyway, this is an awful promotion. How did they think this up? It dones’t make any sense and is a bit mean spirited. It sure has nothing do with lunch and makes me want to go to Burger King even less.