A friend still at an agency texted me the Titanium result at six in the morning Portland time, which is when Cannes lands if you live on this coast. Burger King. The parking lot idea. She wrote three words: they actually won.
Whopper Detour took the Titanium Grand Prix, plus Direct and Mobile. If you missed it in December: Burger King geofenced something like fourteen thousand McDonald's locations and sold a Whopper for one cent, redeemable only while you were standing near one of them, only through the Burger King app.
The lesson being passed around the industry this week is that brands should be funnier and braver.
That is not the lesson.
The idea did not say anything about Burger King. It did something Burger King needed done, and it used a competitor's hundred million dollar real estate footprint to do it.
Here's the part that gets lost. Burger King did not need awareness. Nobody in this country is unaware of the Whopper. What it needed was app installs and a mobile ordering habit, the unglamorous plumbing that will decide who wins the next decade of fast food. A coupon does not build that. A reason to open the app while sitting in somebody else's drive-through line does.
The stunt was a media buy wearing a joke as a disguise. Every McDonald's in America became a Burger King billboard for free, because the only asset a geofence requires is a location that somebody else already paid for.
Three things made it work, and only two of them are copyable. One, it was rooted in a business objective rather than a mood, so success had a number attached before anyone wrote a line. Two, it had a mechanic. You did not watch it, you did it, which is why Domino's paving potholes landed and a hundred purpose films did not. Three, and this is the part nobody can borrow, it was available only to a brand with a long public history of poking McDonald's. Wendy's could have run it. Panera would have been arrested by its own audience.
So the failure mode I expect for the next year is a stack of decks proposing geofenced trolling for brands with no rival worth naming and no app worth opening. The technique will get copied within a month. The strategy underneath it will not, because the strategy took a decade.
The stunt was a media buy wearing a joke as a disguise.
Karaoke Thursday, the sticky-floored place off Belmont, the host who calls everybody baby. I sang Total Eclipse of the Heart, badly, with total commitment, and a man at the bar told me the whole trick is knowing what the bit is for. He meant the key change. I nodded like he was talking about Cannes.