CEO, Paine Publishing
Often organizations try too hard to either capitalize on hot news topics or avoid them altogether. Neither strategy is particularly effective.
First we have Burger King trying waaaaay too hard to leverage not one but two major news events. On the other side, doing its best to avoid the news at all cost was the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which went into a media death spiral as a result. [Editor's Note: As you know, late July 5, just after our deadline, EPA chief Scott Pruitt resigned. That development is not reflected in this story.]
Burger King
The author Michael Pollan famously advised us to, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” To paraphrase him, I’d advise Burger King to, “Use global events. Not too much. Mostly don’t.”
Not surprisingly, this year’s World Cup in Russia had marketers working overtime trying to figure out the cleverest way to capture people’s attention, shares and comments. Burger King won the battle. It offered women $47,000 and a lifetime supply of burgers if they could prove any man who was playing in the World Cup had impregnated them.
Burger King’s World Cup Goal Issue
The first problem was the goal. While most ads are intended to either sell product or build brand, the stated goal of this one came right out of The Handmaid’s Tale. Its Russian spokesperson explained that Burger King made this bizarre offer in order to “procure the best football genes to ensure the success of the Russian Team for generations to come.”
The ad, which might have been acceptable in a totalitarian society bent on dominating world soccer, was posted on the company’s social media account, which of course guaranteed the world would see it. And, not surprisingly women around the world objected.
To BK’s credit, it took only about 48 hours for the ad to be pulled and an apology issued, leaving many wondering if it was just a creative director gone rogue or a publicity stunt.
Driving The Business
The same question was raised two weeks later when Burger King decided to capitalize on the historic moment when Saudi Arabian women finally were allowed to drive cars. To mark the event, the brand renamed its signature sandwich, offering the WhoppHER free to every female driver going through its drive-through during the next 30 days.
While clueless creative types who obviously never heard of domestic abuse lauded the concept, most other observers were left scratching their heads, trying to figure out why Burger King was encouraging violence against women.
The lesson in both of these incidents is nothing you post online, or anywhere for that matter, will be seen only by your designated “target audience.”
While many Russians were unfazed by an ad encouraging women to have sex with random football players, the rest of the world was appalled.
To be sure, in Saudi Arabia there were many Saudi women who were very grateful to eat free burgers for a month regardless of what they were called in English. But women all over the world who also eat at Burger King were horrified.
Have It Your Way
None of this may be an accident. In a recent Business Insider interview with Burger King CMO Fernando Machado, (published the same day as the company apologized for the Russian ad), Machado indicated that he was fine with the brouhaha.
“Honestly, we didn’t have cases of backfiring to the point that truly affected the brand. For us, so far, when something doesn’t work, it’s not like it went negative, it’s more like it didn’t work. So people didn’t talk as much as we thought they would. We didn’t get as much on media as we thought we would,” Machado told Business Insider.
In other words, he’s counting media exposure as “success.” Whether it’s positive or negative doesn’t matter.
Obviously, Burger King met its goal with these two fiascos. Of course the interview with Machado was done before the campaigns were launched, so I wonder if he’d seen them when he told Business Insider: “We try to be respectful, we try to not get divisive, we try to not come across as bullying.”
Not sure what definition of respectful includes encouraging people to “whop” women and getting pregnant just to win a sports competition. Clearly his staff is missing his respectful inclusion message. More likely they know that all he cares about is exposure, so that’s what they’re delivering.
The EPA
If there were an Ig-Nobel prize for crisis communications, the Environmental Protection Agency would win in it in a heartbeat. Never has any organization tried so hard to avoid media scrutiny and yet wound up at the center of so many scandals and front-page stories.
A Sierra Club Freedom of Information (FOIA) request brought to light the extraordinary efforts that EPA director Scott Pruitt’s staff undertook to avoid public scrutiny. Those efforts included ensuring that only scripted questions were allowed at public meetings, dividing the public into friendly and unfriendly camps, threatening to call the police on reporters, blocking media access to public appearances and in general simply being rude to the media.
“You have a great day, you’re a piece of trash,” EPA spokesperson Jahan Wilcox famously told a reporter from The Atlantic. It should also be noted that Wilcox is a veteran of numerous political campaigns, and lacks a communications background.
Erik Wemple, a Washington Post reporter, presciently pointed out, “These recriminations from the EPA press office have been going on for months and where has it gotten them? More piercing, dead-on accurate scandal coverage, not to mention a dozen federal probes of Pruitt.”
The latest scandal revolved around the release of a long-awaited report on PFAS—chemicals known to cause health issues.
Administration officials dubbed the report a potential “public relations nightmare” in emails Politico discovered.
Not surprisingly Pruitt as well as the White House tried to get the report suppressed.
Naturally, as soon as word of the report leaked in May, the scandal became front-page news.
The report revealed that the chemicals studied endangered human health at far lower levels than previously assumed.
Apparently the current “acceptable level” was 10 times higher than what was deemed safe. The report also revealed that the health of roughly one-third of Americans could be at risk from PFAS contamination.
To make things worse, the chemicals have been found at particularly high levels around military bases, including some of those under consideration for housing immigrant children taken from their parents at the border.
Not surprisingly, given the history of bad media relationships and attempts to suppress the news, EPA’s “PR nightmare” shows no signs of ending anytime soon.
And There’s More
And speaking of nightmares, as we were going to press there were reports from Washington that seemed to pour more fuel on the fire at EPA.
The Washington Post reported July 3 Pruitt aides provided details to congressional investigators in recent days about the administrator’s push to find a six-figure job for his wife at a politically connected group. They also discussed his enlisting staffers to perform personal tasks and seeking high-end travel despite aides’ objections.
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