Burger King Advertising

Burger King Advertising

Since it was founded in 1954, international fast food chain Burger King has employed many advertising programs. During the 1970s, its advertisements included a memorable jingle, the inspiration for its current mascot the Burger King and several well-known and parodied slogans, such as Have it your way and It takes two hands to hold a Whopper. From the early 1980s until approximately 2002, Burger King engaged a series of advertising agencies that produced many unsuccessful slogans and programs, including its least successful campaign, Where's Herb?.

In 2003, Burger King hired the Miami-based advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B), which revived the Burger King character used during Burger King's 1970s and 1980s Burger King Kingdom advertising campaign as a caricature now simply called "the King". CP+B also created a series of viral web-based advertisements to complement its television and print promotional campaigns on various social networks and various Burger King corporate pages. These viral campaigns, other new campaigns and a series of new product introductions, drew both positive and negative attention to Burger King and helped TPG and its partners earn approximately US$367 million in dividends. After the late-2000s recession, Burger King's owner, TPG Capital, divested itself of the chain in 2010; the new owner, 3G Capital, ended its relationship with CP+B and hired McGarryBowen to begin a new campaign targeted on a broader demographic.

Burger King successfully partnered with George Lucas's Lucasfilm to promote the 1977 movie Star Wars, one of the first product tie-ins in the fast food industry. The company's most successful tie-ins were those between 1990 and 2000, with successful campaigns involving Disney's animated films, including Beauty & the Beast, Toy Story, and the Pokémon franchise in 1999.