Burger King’s ‘Whopper Whopper’—the wild ride of a maddeningly catchy jingle

If you haven’t heard Burger King’s “Whopper Whopper” jingle yet, you clearly haven’t been watching enough football.

But the earworm from BK’s “You Rule” campaign has been spreading well beyond NFL telecasts in recent weeks, infiltrating every social media space, from Twitter to TikTok, with its tuneful, uncomplicated love of flame-grilled hamburgers.

This isn’t thanks to a media buy. Rather, it’s people claiming the jingle as their own, embracing and repurposing it—with that weird mix of affection and mockery common to all memes—for an ocean of original content. And according to the agency that made it, this virality is the result of a less precious approach to BK advertising that simply aims to be the most fun for the most people.

8 Mile to Daft Punk

If you’ve been living under a rock, here’s what we’re talking about:

“We were talking, like, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if people just sang about Burger King, super simple, with a catchy jingle?’” Powell told Ad Age. “We freestyled a couple of lines. We went into a meeting at the agency and said, ‘We’re either going to look crazy or it’s going to work.’ And it worked. We knew we had something that was going to pop.”

They couldn’t have known it would pop this much. But they did painstakingly craft the song, whose melody comes from the “Have It Your Way” jingle from the ’70s, modernized with more of a rap style.

“We knew we wanted something that wasn’t too heavy on the instrumentation, so the words could be the star,” said Powell. “We probably did 150 demos—different beats, voices, arrangements—until we landed on the one. It didn’t feel too much like one genre or one sound. We wanted to leave it open, so people could take it and have fun and do different interpretations of it.”

“It’s been awesome to see how much it’s gone off. People have really reacted to it,” said Ben Pfutzenreuter, group creative director, OKRP. “In the last week or two, it’s really burst at the seams in other parts of the internet where we spend time. We’re tracking it because it’s our job, but also just as human beings out in the world. You can’t help but trip over this thing everywhere.”

A creative departure

This is, quite intentionally, a new creative direction for BK. When OKRP won the business, the brief for the advertising—part of a $400 million, two-year brand overhaul—was to “put the consumer back in front,” agency CEO Tom O’Keefe told Ad Age last year. This followed years of work, from agency David and others, that included creatively lauded but polarizing stunts like Andy Warhol silently eating a Whopper in a Super Bowl ad and the “Moldy Whopper” campaign showing decaying food to illustrate the lack of preservatives in the food.

OKRP said it admired the creativity of the previous work, but wanted to make something that could be more universally embraced.

“We’re trying to make stuff people like, not that the industry likes,” said Pfutzenreuter. “This campaign feels like it’s broad, it’s having a good time, and it’s welcoming. It’s not overly concerned with impressing you as much as it is making an impression. It feels fun, and you can’t get it out of your head. That’s probably the best north star to chase when you’re making advertising.”

Asked about the fine line between the song being awesomely catchy and annoyingly catchy, Pfutzenreuter rejected the premise of the question—another glimpse into OKRP’s thinking.

“I don’t know that the nuance between those two things matters to consumers half as much as it matters to us, as we talk about it right now,” he said. “What I know, being somebody who is 35 years old and has spent the majority of my life on the internet, I can tell you there isn’t a big difference between being delighted by it because you love it and being delighted by it because you can’t forget it. That isn’t as meaningful to people as I think we want it to be.”

“I don’t think that line means much to the average person,” added Powell. “We only fool ourselves, thinking like that.”

‘It’s working very well’

Accelerant Research said this week that the BK campaign scored a remarkable 99 percent in brand recall—the percentage of people noticing a brand being advertised—and 62 percent for both likability and engagement.

BK’s fourth-quarter sales won’t be announced by parent company Restaurant Brands International until mid-February. But the agency says the campaign’s results have been strong. “It’s not just working well. It’s working very well,” said Rahul Roy, OKRP’s chief client officer.

So, for anyone getting tired of the jingle—sorry, you’re going to have to buckle up for more iterations. Indeed, the agency has already been making them; they’ve created close to 40 different cuts now, with different lyrics on top of the melody, some of which you can see on the brand’s YouTube. And that process is ongoing.

“It took a few weeks for it to incubate, but now it’s at this frenetic pace where everybody’s just trying to make a funnier thing than the last thing we saw,” said Pfutzenreuter. “Outside this room right now, we’ve got an army of creatives singing this stuff with different words. For us, there’s no reason to take our foot off the gas. It’s just a blast trying to think of what we’re going to say next.”