Burger King Ad and Our Loss to World Culture

Time is becoming short to fulfill my prophecy of another 6 posts, so when I saw a news bit today about the insensitivity of Burger King's new ad campaign and Max wasn't a particularly receptive audience to my feelings about it, I decided to pop over here and vent.

Burger King recently began a new ad campaign, found at Whoppervirgins.com, that shows people trying a Whopper for the very first time.  The use of the word 'virgin' might be what first piques interest in the site, but after a few moments of watching, you realize how interesting the video actually has the potential to be.  You see, the advertising company went around the world, located people and cultures who are relatively isolated from the commercially saturated world culture - some folks in Romania, Greenland, and Thailand - transported them to a location where access to both a Burger King and a McDonald's was only moments away, and then set up a taste test between a Whopper and a Big Mac.

You'd expect, of course, that Burger King would come out the winner in the taste test, and it does with three to four times more people choosing the Whopper over the Big Mac or stating no preference, but aside from the moment of surprise you have when they show the Big Mac being the first burger chosen, and the cynical feeling you get when the Whopper eventually dominates, the overwhelming feeling you get from watching the video is one of wonder.

Aside from attempting to convince us that folks who haven't been saturated with media from the day they were born are able to choose a better tasting burger than the rest of us, the video really seems to best point out how wonderful the world we all take for granted really is.  And I don't mean 'wonderful' in the sense of great but rather in its true literal sense of filled with wonder.  While you watch the second half of the video in which they manage to bring an authentic BK grill to the towns of the test subjects, allowing anyone who wishes to have a Whopper, you see the townspeople intrigued by this taste of the world at large and you get to smile seeing them try to tackle the handling of an alien and messy food.  But more interestingly, you see the advertising and filming crew intrigued and humbled themselves by the townspeople they came there to impress.

Having lived in Germany for very nearly two years now, I have come to realize that the American culture, while admittedly having glaring differences, has already become part of the German culture.  As time passes here, I see more and more of this in the proliferation of chain stores, consumerism, and garbage made in China.  I expect that some day it will feel very much the same to live in either place.  So, seeing Burger King's Whopper Virgins ad campaign, I must admit to a great amount of sadness mixed in with my enjoyment.  For, while I don't delude myself into believing that the townspeople shown in this video had never come in contact with the world that I live in, I know that they are now even more indoctrinated into something that I have come to see as not worth the price we pay for it.  I am aware that everyone must make their own path in life and learn things in their own time, but I still wish I could tell them to treat what they have just experienced carefully and to be cautious to not put it on a pedestal of experience which might cause them to seek it out and, in the process, lose what is special about their culture.  Sooner or later, it seems to happen to everyone and one day there will be no virgins left.

P.S. If Burger King's intent was to make me want to go to Burger King after watching this, sorry - I'm a Wendy's fan.

P.P.S. To the folks who are bothered by BK spending so much money to make this video when there are starving children in (pick your favorite place), I say "Get a grip."  Certainly it's ironic, but you never would have raised the BS flag if they hadn't made the association for you.  Companies waste ridiculous sums of money every single day promoting their products but no one ever says "The licensing fees you paid to use that song could have fed a small village in Uganda for a year!"

P.P.P.S  Burger King wants you to know that the townspeople shown in their video were all well fed before they arrived, were doing fine on their own, and were not exploited because they were impoverished or malnourished.  Children with protruding bellies only makes for good footage if you are advertising the Christian Children's Fund.