A Twitter comedian and influencer named Keaton Patti posted a viral tweet about how his “bot” wrote an Olive Garden commercial on its own (filled with nonsensical mistakes). No one could tell whether it was a bad computer or just a funny human.

Since Burger King believes in perfectly imperfect food made by passionate makers, we wanted to jump on the conversation to make a point about the power of the human touch. So, Burger King partnered with Patti to launch a 360 campaign fully written by his “bot” to create a new wave of conversation around the topic “will A.I. replace human creativity?”

Burger King laughed at the issue by talking about it in a self-deprecating way – by making a campaign that only humans can make. Together with influencer and Twitter comedian Keaton Patti, we launched a fictional bot that supposedly wrote its own campaign through machine learning. It was a satire of the whole conversation. It showed what happens when you give robots too much power, proving that human creativity can’t be replaced.

People were confused and couldn’t tell whether the campaign was actually written by A.I. or a human. The writing intentionally walked between this line, proving in the end that only humans could come up with such nuanced sense of humor.

This campaign was the first “reverse Turing Test” campaign ever.

Burger King stands for perfectly imperfect food made by perfectly imperfect makers. It’s real food for real people. So we wanted to reassure our customers – those who fear that A.I. will replace them in the future – that nothing can replicate the human factor.

We wanted to create a multichannel campaign that would walk the fine line between making people believe that this was actually written by a robot and hilariously absurd. Although most of the execution live offline (TV and radio), this would inspire people to take the conversation online and discuss, “will A.I. replace us all?”

Our goal was to fool the audience into thinking these terrible ads were made by a bad A.I. (even though it was actually written by humans), to ultimately prove that nothing can replace a human maker.

We partnered with Keaton Patti, an influencer and Twitter comedian, and analyzed over 1000 hours of Burger King ads to try and imitate the results of machine learning. We implemented the campaign in a variety of channels: TV, radio, and online videos. We even took over Burger King’s social media accounts too. All these executions streamlined consumer conversation about the topic online – on YouTube, Keaton Patti’s Twitter, Burger King’s social media pages, etc.

We successfully fooled people into thinking this work was actually written by artificial intelligence, even though it was written by humans.

- 700 million impressions

- $7 million USD in earned media

- A.I. ads beat human ads in branding