"When will the madness end at Burger King?" asked Nancy Luna, the writer of the OC Register's "Fast Food Maven" blog earlier this month. Luna was appalled at BK's latest gambit, a program called the Whopper Sacrifice Challenge that dangled a free Whopper for anyone who unfriends 10 people from Facebook.

That's right. Burger King wasn't asking you to get more friends on Facebook. It wasn't asking you to send a virtual Whopper or something like that. The chain wanted you to swap some of your online buddies for a hamburger.

Yes, the campaign—which BK eventually decided to pull after Facebook complained—was edgy. It's even, on some level, offensive. But mad? Try brilliant.

And add "characteristic." Ever since Russ Klein signed on as CMO in 2003 and hired Crispin Porter + Bogusky in 2004, Burger King has been a textbook case in how to turn a brand around. Though some, like Luna, have tut-tutted some of BK's more outrageous stunts in the Klein years, it's hard to think of a false move Klein & Co. have made. The chain has been a model of consistent branding. You may not like what BK stands for, but you know what it stands for. Can you say the same of, say, Wendy's?

Klein's achievement is even more impressive if you look at BK before 2003. Back then "Burger King Account in Review," was one of those static headlines like "Bombing Threatens Middle East Peace Accord" or "Spinoff of CSI Announced" that became a running joke in the industry. Similarly, BK had an inexhaustible appetite for new taglines, which ranged from "Get your burger's worth" to "It just tastes better" to "Going the distance" to "Got the urge?"

In those days, the only urge Burger King consistently demonstrated was an urge to reinvent itself. Even when the chain got a good idea, it often bungled it, such as when Kathleen Turner purred the voiceovers for the "Urge" campaign, but then the chain had to pull the narration because BK corporate had not cleared it with the Screen Actors Guild.



Part of the problem was that BK had been passed around to different owners like a case of herpes. The Pillsbury Co. bought BK in 1967. Then Pillsbury itself was swallowed up by British firm Grand Metropolitan in 1989, which merged with Guinness to become Diageo in 1997 and then spun off BK in 2001. (BK is now owned by a group of private equity firms.) By the time Klein arrived in 2003, BK seemed well past its prime, a brand that had been recast so many times that it was, in marketing terms, damaged goods.

One of Klein's first moves was to resurrect the personage of the King, who hadn't been seen much since the 1970s. In his heyday, the crown-wearing, red-bearded mascot was a sort of dull patriarch of the brand, vaguely resembling Michael Gross of Family Ties. At best, he was a straight man to other Burger King characters, like the execrable Duke of Doubt.

Instead of trying to make the King cool again (maybe by giving him a goatee?), BK and Crispin took a much odder tack: They exhumed him all right, but as a sort of two-dimensional cardboard cutout (it was actually a guy wearing an immobile mask). "Creepy" is the word that comes up most often to describe the new King. How else to describe what looks like a man struck by a full-facial version of Bell's palsy with a motionless rictus?

It worked though. The campaign roughly coincided with the extreme deadpan (if there is such a thing) humor of Napoleon Dynamite and the guerrilla comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen, both of which were hits with the target audience. Plus, the ads were funny. One memorable spot featured the King and his agent at a press conference. As the agent bats away one question after another about the size of the King's head, the final question, "Has the success of the Double Whopper also made his head big—bigger than it was?" elicits an "I'm watching you" gesture from the King. Everything else was consistent in tone, whether it was the Whopper Freakout (a Punk'd-like hidden camera thing where people were told Burger King was discontinuing the Whopper) to a BK videogame (which sold millions) to the "Angry Whopper" (so named because it's spicy and "bites you back.")

So why does BK get so little respect? I think it's because marketing to the eBaum's World demo is seen as easy or degrading for a brand. That's because to win over that audience, a brand has to necessarily alienate others. There's still a belief in this industry that, whatever the demo, marketing has to be palatable to everyone. It doesn't. If you're outside the demo, the King doesn't want to be your friend. In fact, he wants to unfriend you.