Sunday, January 18, 2009

Advertising and Web 2.0



Social networking is a rage today and advertisers are trying to cash in on this phenomenon...Burger King came up with a Facebook application called Whopper Sacrifice which required users to 'sacrifice' 10 friendships in order to receive a coupon for a free Whopper...







Faced with high abandonment rates (82,000 people deleted 233,906 friends), Facebook decided to discontinue this application stating that it violated its privacy policy...Normally when a person is de-friended, he or she may not even notice but not in this case...Part of the Whopper application made sure that each of the 10 friends ditched got a nice note alerting him or her to the fact that he or she had been de-friended...Facebook's privacy policy may have been violated but they were more worried about the high de-listing rates...In other words, Burger King's campaign was successful...It was controversial enough to get them tons of press coverage without really offending many people...And what does it say about Facebook users and society in general? A $3 burger is worth more than staying in touch with friends...

Check out Burger King's site : Whopper Sacrifice