Burger King is on fire with its latest marketing efforts, especially when it comes to incinerating its rival McDonald’s.
In its latest ads and effort to mock Macca’s, Burger King is once again tapping into humanity’s cultural fear of clowns.
Spanish agency LOLA MullenLowe won global acclaim for its 2017 Scary Clown Night promotion, which gave free whoppers to people who dressed as clowns on Halloween.
This time, however, the creative agency has gone with a different tactic, printing a series of ads that feature very real and terrified children in the presence of very real and terrifying clowns.
The ads read: “Birthdays should be happy. Come to Burger King and book a clown-free birthday party.”
Check out the spectacular print ads below.
Burger King’s head of global marketing Marcelo Pascoa told Adweek: “Burger King knows that birthdays are a very big deal for kids, and we believe they should be fun and clown-free.
“We prefer to be on the good side of children’s memories, not the scary ones, like the traumatized kids in these ads.”
Burger King’s statement announcing its campaign jokingly came with the memo that “5 out of 5 people are terrified of clowns”, but is it true?
According to a 2016 survey by Vox, 42 per cent of Americans are afraid of clowns, making clowns the second scariest issue on the survey list.
The only thing Americans find scarier than clowns is government corruption, but clowns are scarier than terrorists, climate change, gun rights infringement and strangely, Obamacare.
CREDITS:
Agency: LOLA MullenLowe
Campaign: Birthday Clowns
Client: Burger King
Client Contact: Fernando Machado, Marcelo Pascoa, Rogelio Magaña
Chief Creative Officer: Chacho Puebla
Director Creativo Ejecutivo: Tomás Ostiglia, Pancho Cassis
Director Creativo: André Toledo, Saulo Rocha
Head of Art: Fabio Brigido
Head of Innovation: Fred Bosch
Copywriter: Luis Giraldo
Art Director: Felipe Antonioli
Managing Director: Tom Elliston
Global Account Director: Carlos Solchaga
Account Supervisor: Adriana Gonzalez Cid
Strategic Planner: Marcelle Santos
Agency Producer: Felipe Calviño, Diego Baltazar
Head of Communications: Sarah Okrent
Photographer: Ale Burset
