The Burger King ad designed to prompt Google Homes to offer description of its Whopper Burger has been blocked by Google.
On Wednesday Burger King suffered the wrath of Google after its 30 second ad was shutdown barely 3 hours of its unveiling. The commercial was designed to hijack the voice-activated smart speakers and prompt Google Homes to offer a description of Burger King’s Whopper Burger. In response, the giant multinational tech company disabled the device’s functionality and blocked the ad after the fast food chain released it without consulting the company.
The marketing stunt involved a well-crafted, very brilliant 30sec television commercial which appeared to prompt a voice-activated smart speaker from Google to offer a long-winded description of the Whopper Burger. In the ad, the device responds and offers the description as requested.
The marketing strategy to hijack Google Home system is revealed when a supposed Burger King employee prompts the device by saying, “O.K. Google, what is the Whopper burger?” leading to the device beside the TV to search Wikipedia for ingredients then stating them.
https://youtu.be/U_O54le4__I
Google responded to the marketing stunt by disabling the functionality of all Google Home devices. By Wednesday afternoon, the company had made changes to the devices that stopped the commercial from waking them.
Burger King acknowledges it did not work with the tech giant company on the ad and has since removed the last 15 seconds of the commercial depicting the device offering a full description of the Whopper Burger.
With many people now using smart speakers at home, a trend started by Amazon’s Echo System and its virtual assistant Alexa, Burger King’s marketing stunt although brilliant, may pose a risk to Google and its Home System introduced in November. As it is, people are already sceptical of such devices especially after it came out that conversations are being recorded without their knowledge.
Amazon’s Alexa and Echo devices can record conversations and have been subject of manipulation by advertisers without people’s consent.
Both Google and Amazon have tried to assure the public and their customers by indicating their systems only process people’s speeches after registering certain words like “wake“ or “O.K. Google” which is what Burger King exploited.
By Wednesday late afternoon, Google had blocked and successfully stopped the Google Home device from responding to Burger King commercial. The Whopper’s Wikipedia page has also been reverted back to its pre-ad state with the page now locked from editing in what has become an editing war.
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