Whopper Sacrifice

Why it works

A Facebook app that put a price on friendship: delete ten friends and get a coupon for a free Whopper. Launched by Burger King and Crispin Porter + Bogusky in January 2009, it did what Facebook itself deliberately never did, telling each discarded friend that they had been sacrificed for a burger and turning a private click into a public joke. TechCrunch counted 233,906 friends removed by 82,771 people in under a week. Facebook then disabled the app because the unfriend notices broke its privacy expectations, and Burger King chose to end the promotion rather than remove the feature that made it funny. It is studied as one of the first campaigns built out of a social platform's own mechanics rather than simply placed on it, as a sharp read of how thin online 'friendship' had become, and as an early lesson in how a platform's rules can switch off an idea that works too well.