In Brazil, Burger King and McDonald's compete head to head for consumer preference indices.

Showing product superiority in comparison to McDonald’s is an evergreen briefing for Burger King. Especially when it’s about specific points, like the flame-grilled meat or the size.

So the brand stays alert for any opportunity of how to prove it in different ways. And when McDonald’s decided to air its Chat GPT billboard, it was as if a siren had gone off at Burger King headquarters.

Because it also reinforces another important BK atributes: authenticity and the mischievous brand behavior.

In June 2023, McDonald’s asked Chat GPT which burger was the most iconic. The answer was the Big Mac. So they transformed it into a self-congratulatory campaign. But no one really cared that much about it. At all.

A few days later, Burger King added one more question to the same prompt: “and which one is the biggest?”. The answer was the Whopper. So we found one single vacant billboard side by side to the McDonald’s ad. And one single picture of this billboard was enough to go viral.

What may seem like a minimalist strategy was actually Burger King's way of creating the perfect bait for the content to go viral.

After mapping out all the billboards where McDonald’s had placed its campaign, BK found some alternatives to deliver the response.

Following a study on people's circulation in each of these options, BK found the perfect billboard where it was most likely that both ads would be photographed.

And only after the photo went viral that Burger King announced its PR release telling the story.

First, we mapped out all the McDonald's billboards across the city. Then, we looked for those with nearby available space to place ours, which was a provocative response to theirs.

Among these, we chose a billboard in a high-traffic area so that the maximum number of people could see it.

Then, we waited for it to organically become a topic of discussion as people took photos of these billboards to post on their social networks.

Once there were already engaged consumers and influencers taking advantage of the hype to generate content, we released a statement to further grow the story.

This story ended up going viral in Brazil and worldwide.

Total UVM - 1B

The total number of all unique visitors per month across publications tracked.

Total Engagement - 1,386

The number of times the link was shared on social media.

Journalist Reach - 332,998

The total number of people following the journalist who shared the link (via X)

All data was provided by the PR Agency Powell Communications.