Comments on: Burger King Lets People Sacrifice Friendships For Whoppers

By: LadyinRed

LadyinRed — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:25:01 +0000

This is very funny I might add. I mean, what would people do for free, unhealthy food? They would probably shot their grandmothers if got a free whopper:)) Jesus Christ!!!

By: Hits. « Media Mix

Hits. « Media Mix — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:28:52 +0000

[...] Burger King created my favorite FB app ever, Whopper Sacrafice, which sacraficed over 230,000 friends before Facebook killed it off over “privacy concerns”. Do I even have to tell you how much I love it? I like to keep my friend list to around 100…I can always delete a few FB friends. But not you of course…Good recap on the app here. [...]

By: CoryOBrien

CoryOBrien — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:30:20 +0000

My calculations weren't off, but my labeling sure was! (Thanks for pointing that out.) When I wrote this article, roughly 45,000 friends had been sacrificed. (As seen in the screenshot,) I've since updated the original calculation with the corrected label, though it's worth noting that by the time the app was taken down, more than 230,000 friends were sacrificed, so the final cost is much different.

You're also right that the number of coupons is probably less, since not everyone sacrificed exactly 10 friends, but while I figured that some would sacrifice less than 10 friends, I also figured that some would sacrifice more trying to get extra free coupons, so I thought that 10 friends per burger was a good number to use for estimates.

Lastly, while the price of the burger for Burger King is surely much less than $3, I was also taking into account the opportunity cost of a free burger, since they were giving up $3 in revenue that they would have with a sale. You are right though, the actual 'cost' of this campaign for Burger King is lower than $3 per burger coupon.

By: Milos

Milos — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 01:33:07 +0000

I think your calculation near the end of the article is a bit wrong – why would you divide 45,000 burgers by 10? If ~230k friendships have been broken, and around 80k people dumped at least on friend, it's obvious that not everyone fulfilled the “10 friends” task. Also, if a total of 230k friendships were broken, it means that a maximum of 23k coupons may be awarded; with the large number of people who have deleted 10 friends from the list, an even smaller number of coupons has probably been given out. All that said, where'd you get the 45,000 burgers number?

Also, if you pay $3 for a Whopper when you go to a Burger King, it probably costs them much less than that to make. Maybe $1? Not more than $2, that's for sure.

Other than that, the press-conference is a really good idea, I hope they think of something like that. On the other hand, they might simply decide that it wouldn't be a good move overall, or maybe there could be legal barriers – I'm not from the US, so I'm not familiar with laws concerning advertising over there.

By: Cool Website Tuesdays: Whooper Sacrifice | Usability Counts

Cool Website Tuesdays: Whooper Sacrifice | Usability Counts — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:01:32 +0000

[...] it’s been very successful from an awareness standpoint (Other posts at The Future of Ads, Inside Facebook). What do you [...]