Beginning in the mid-2000s, the fast food chain Burger King began running a series of deeply disturbing advertisements. They star a revamped version of the company’s mascot, The King, who has left the world of animated children’s advertisements and is now played by an actor wearing a large plastic mask featuring a crown, a beard, and an alarming perpetual smile. One typical ad features a man waking up in the morning to find The King in bed with him, staring at him inches away from his face. The man is initially alarmed, but becomes calm when The King hands him a breakfast sandwich. As he eats, he and The King become friendlier, joking, laughing, and even briefly brushing hands—and then they both flinch away and face forward in the bed. In another, a man wakes up, opens the blinds, and finds The King standing there staring at him. He starts to become agitated until he notices that The King is holding a plate with a breakfast sandwich.
These ads, whose mascot was widely called the “Creepy King” in the press and among viewers, generated considerable word-of-mouth attention for Burger King, and in a sense, they could be viewed as one of the most successful “viral marketing” campaigns of all time. Unfortunately for Burger King, the attention was almost uniformly negative. In light of the public’s revulsion, the firm’s advertising agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, tweaked the formula slightly. In one later ad, The King crashes through an office window in a relentless quest to replace a woman’s microwaved lunch with a huge hamburger, while in another, he engages in a “reverse pick-pocketing” scheme wherein he sneaks money into people’s pockets, apparently symbolizing his commitment to saving customers money.
The shift to surrealism was not enough to shake the “Creepy King” image, and ultimately the mascot was retired. Yet The King lives on, seared into the American cultural consciousness as an enduring archetype of creepiness. I’ve been researching the topic for years, primarily by asking people what they think of creepiness. Every definition I attempted was rejected as inadequate, and every creepy pop cultural character seemed open to other interpretations—except for one. The King is the one example that always receives unanimous consent.
Doubtless a big part of the character’s impact is the simple shock that such an off-putting theme would be part of an advertisement. It’s rare enough to have an aggressively creepy character on television, and even then the writers will normally make some effort to make the character somehow relatable or sympathetic. Yet The King has no back-story, no mitigating factors. He is sheer creepiness embodied, all the more so given his unexpected irruption into a genre that normally makes every effort to pander to the viewer.
How could this happen? On a practical level, one can see how a space for such an unprecedented campaign could open up precisely at Burger King. A perpetual also-ran in the fast food industry, Burger King is a frequent target for private equity companies eager to snatch up ailing firms and apply their cost-cutting magic to return them to profitability. Hence it is also a chronically mismanaged firm, lurching from one contrived strategy to the next. In that context, an advertising campaign that used shock value to generate cheap publicity could easily sound like a plausible option.
It seems to me, however, that there is a deeper truth at work in the “Creepy King” campaign. This truth emerges in one of the least creepy King ads, which portrays him breaking into McDonald’s headquarters to steal the recipe for the Egg McMuffin so that Burger King can produce a copycat sandwich. Here we have a company openly admitting to its own redundancy, its lack of any mandate for existence. Maybe Burger King can give you slightly more food, or give it to you cheaper—but at the end of the day, it’s not contributing anything distinctive, original, or even particularly desirable. The commercials in fact exacerbate this sense of providing a generic food substance by referring to Burger King’s food primarily as “meat,” rather than naming the particular type of meat involved. Finally, the use of the mascot only highlights the contrast with McDonald’s: while we might imagine people being nostalgic about characters like Ronald McDonald or the Hamburglar, literally no one has fond memories of the old Burger King mascot that this ad is reviving.
There’s no reason for me to have any emotional connection with Burger King beyond the minimal investment it takes to prefer a Whopper to a Big Mac—and yet these commercials are manipulating me into a very strong (if negative) emotional response. As unprecedented as this ad campaign is on one level, though, is it really anything more than an intensification of what has been latent in Burger King all along? Haven’t all of its ads made disproportionate emotional demands on us, asking us to feel some kind of loyalty or affection for a McDonald’s knock-off? Burger King has nothing to offer us, and yet it has been demanding our attention and shoving itself at us nonetheless. In the last analysis, there was always something creepy about Burger King, and for a brief, uncanny moment, they were honest about it.
I am not the first commentator to be drawn almost involuntarily into the territory of creepiness. Most notably, Sigmund Freud beat me to it by nearly a century, in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny.” The term “uncanny” is a translation of the German word unheimlich (literally “unhomely”), which refers to a wide range of phenomena associated with fear and dread. Freud detects an ambivalence in the term, which etymologically seems to refer to what is unfamiliar (what we are not at home with) but experientially most often involves something that is all too familiar, something that fits too well.
These ads, whose mascot was widely called the “Creepy King” in the press and among viewers, generated considerable word-of-mouth attention for Burger King, and in a sense, they could be viewed as one of the most successful “viral marketing” campaigns of all time. Unfortunately for Burger King, the attention was almost uniformly negative. In light of the public’s revulsion, the firm’s advertising agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, tweaked the formula slightly. In one later ad, The King crashes through an office window in a relentless quest to replace a woman’s microwaved lunch with a huge hamburger, while in another, he engages in a “reverse pick-pocketing” scheme wherein he sneaks money into people’s pockets, apparently symbolizing his commitment to saving customers money.The shift to surrealism was not enough to shake the “Creepy King” image, and ultimately the mascot was retired. Yet The King lives on, seared into the American cultural consciousness as an enduring archetype of creepiness. I’ve been researching the topic for years, primarily by asking people what they think of creepiness. Every definition I attempted was rejected as inadequate, and every creepy pop cultural character seemed open to other interpretations—except for one. The King is the one example that always receives unanimous consent.
Doubtless a big part of the character’s impact is the simple shock that such an off-putting theme would be part of an advertisement. It’s rare enough to have an aggressively creepy character on television, and even then the writers will normally make some effort to make the character somehow relatable or sympathetic. Yet The King has no back-story, no mitigating factors. He is sheer creepiness embodied, all the more so given his unexpected irruption into a genre that normally makes every effort to pander to the viewer.
How could this happen? On a practical level, one can see how a space for such an unprecedented campaign could open up precisely at Burger King. A perpetual also-ran in the fast food industry, Burger King is a frequent target for private equity companies eager to snatch up ailing firms and apply their cost-cutting magic to return them to profitability. Hence it is also a chronically mismanaged firm, lurching from one contrived strategy to the next. In that context, an advertising campaign that used shock value to generate cheap publicity could easily sound like a plausible option.
It seems to me, however, that there is a deeper truth at work in the “Creepy King” campaign. This truth emerges in one of the least creepy King ads, which portrays him breaking into McDonald’s headquarters to steal the recipe for the Egg McMuffin so that Burger King can produce a copycat sandwich. Here we have a company openly admitting to its own redundancy, its lack of any mandate for existence. Maybe Burger King can give you slightly more food, or give it to you cheaper—but at the end of the day, it’s not contributing anything distinctive, original, or even particularly desirable. The commercials in fact exacerbate this sense of providing a generic food substance by referring to Burger King’s food primarily as “meat,” rather than naming the particular type of meat involved. Finally, the use of the mascot only highlights the contrast with McDonald’s: while we might imagine people being nostalgic about characters like Ronald McDonald or the Hamburglar, literally no one has fond memories of the old Burger King mascot that this ad is reviving.
There’s no reason for me to have any emotional connection with Burger King beyond the minimal investment it takes to prefer a Whopper to a Big Mac—and yet these commercials are manipulating me into a very strong (if negative) emotional response. As unprecedented as this ad campaign is on one level, though, is it really anything more than an intensification of what has been latent in Burger King all along? Haven’t all of its ads made disproportionate emotional demands on us, asking us to feel some kind of loyalty or affection for a McDonald’s knock-off? Burger King has nothing to offer us, and yet it has been demanding our attention and shoving itself at us nonetheless. In the last analysis, there was always something creepy about Burger King, and for a brief, uncanny moment, they were honest about it.
I am not the first commentator to be drawn almost involuntarily into the territory of creepiness. Most notably, Sigmund Freud beat me to it by nearly a century, in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny.” The term “uncanny” is a translation of the German word unheimlich (literally “unhomely”), which refers to a wide range of phenomena associated with fear and dread. Freud detects an ambivalence in the term, which etymologically seems to refer to what is unfamiliar (what we are not at home with) but experientially most often involves something that is all too familiar, something that fits too well.
by Adam Kotsko, TNI | Read more:
Image: uncredited
