Burger King tries to be funny and edgy in its ads and almost always gets it wrong, looking mostly odd and dumb. Now it has even topped itself:
Burger King is under fire for a new advertising campaign featuring "burger virgins", impoverished villagers in remote parts of the world, taking part in Whopper versus Big Mac taste tests.
In teaser adverts promoting its "Whopper Virgins" challenge, the fast food chain describes how it sought out farmers in rural Romania, Thai villagers and residents of Greenland's icy tundra to compare its signature burger with arch rival McDonalds'.
[. . .]
Brian Morrissey, writing on Adfreak.com, likens the campaign to colonialism and declares it "embarrassing and emblematic of how ignorant Americans still seem to the rest of the world."
"It doesn't get much more offensive than this," noted The Inquisitor blog. "If visiting poor people in remote locations, some who would be at best surviving on below poverty levels and throwing a burger in their faces isn't bad enough, it gets better, because they also ask the Whopper Virgins to compare the taste of the Whopper to a McDonalds Big Mac as well.
"It's hard to place exactly where this begins on the level of wrongness."
It ranks pretty high on the level of weirdness, too. Still, not quite as creepy as the ad with the guy waking up next to the king. Eeeuw!
