Burger King: humour for British instead of British humour

A Burger King piece in England made to divulge its Double Cheeseburger has raised polemic. Lots of Brazilian blogs, besides authorities in Rio, say it is about a bad taste humour or that simply a global advertiser shouldn’t mistreat a country from another – as we’ve seen the same BK with an American film defaming a Mexican.

I am not interested in the film; I’m going to talk about the BK British piece.

On the online Meio&Mensagem, the report was not impartial whatsoever. If they had properly worked on both the translation and the overall message there wouldn’t probably have been any polemic.

The overall is: “Such a tasteful sandwich like that for such a small price will certainly make you feel like you robbed us”. For this to happen, the piece kicks off by a big, detached title saying that “One-way ticket to Rio is not necessary”. That’s because they’ve used a historic fact, probably well-known by any average British person, the Ronald Biggs episode, which shows the intention was to mean a runaway to a paradise. Biggs probably means for the UK history what Frank Abagnale means for the US history – with less astuteness of course.

The art direction has perfectly set the elements out by putting a big title up, aiming to attract attention, the good deal in the middle and then the small text below, aiming to conclude the others. Its reading sequence is: 1) There’s no need to run away to Rio; 2) The reason why we’re talking about going away to Rio (what the big deal is about); and 3) conclusion (such a big deal will make you feel like you robbed us).

M&M’s translation into Portuguese was bad done, both the title and the text. One-way ticket means go forever. The text was put sort of an ‘already’ and a gerund-form verb that don’t make any sense at all.

The overall message being understood by nobody worries me. We, the ad people, are continually discussing with clients who don’t understand an idea exactly because they don’t understand the elements functions. And now we are making the same mistake. We, the ad people.

The piece is great, well done both on art and copy (notice that they both add up each other to make sense) and resorts to a local fact to get closer to the target, which by the way is terrific for a foreign brand. I’d rather see brands that use local facts to get closer to their target than see that global ones which, afraid of upsetting New Yorkers by pleasing Angelinos, land up doing shallow things only.

It was acceptable if Brazilians had only misunderstood the piece – just for not being aware of Ronald Biggs’s case. But thinking BK and the UK would be criticizing the Brazilian security on a £2.99-sandwich ad piece is too much pretension of ours…