Fifteen years ago, McDonald’s delivered Burger King a gut punch in the form of a commercial. It featured a little boy frustrated by his school chums stealing his McDonald’s fries, so he comes up with an ingenious solution: Hide the fries in a Burger King bag. Nobody touched them.
Though it was a McDonald’s affiliate in Germany that created the spot, anyone could watch it on Vimeo—and Burger King was pissed. “McDonald’s has broken the rules of comparative advertising by degrading the Burger King brand,” it fumed. A chastened McDonald’s took the ad down.
How quickly the tables turn.
After last month’s social video featuring McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski looking very uncomfortable as he tried the new Big Arch burger, the first brand to taunt him was Burger King, whose president Tom Curtis proved a natural on camera, chowing down on an “improved” Whopper—which BK recently revamped—and asking for a napkin.
That was earlier this week. Then on March 4, Wendy’s U.S. president Pete Suerken piled on by starring in his own video posted to LinkedIn. Standing at the grill, Suerken cooks up a Baconator and adds a jab at McDonald’s often out-of-commission soft-serve machines as he makes himself a Frosty: “Oh wait, our machines are always working!”
Marketing becomes a contact sport
Brands taking pokes at their competition isn’t new, of course. A generation ago, Audi famously roasted all of its competitors in its “Four Key Rings” ad, and Samsung’s Galaxy S6 Edge slammed Apple’s iPhone 6 in 2015. But the recent proliferation of brands dissing and dismissing their rivals suggests there’s a bigger socioeconomic shift underway.
“We’re in an attention economy—playing it safe is often the riskiest move you can make,” said Mike Harris, COO and partner at PR firm Uproar by Moburst. “Brands have watched challengers punch up at category leaders forever. What’s changed is that even the big guys are realizing a well-aimed jab gets you more coverage than a campaign you spent a year and a fortune building. Social media turned competitive trash talk into a spectator sport. And brands are finally showing up to play.”
Yes, they are. The Super Bowl witnessed some notable burns. Anthropic ran two ads (one of them pregame) where grinning-idiot actors represent chatbots that incorporate sales pitches into their advice, to the dismay of people asking for help. The slogan—“Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude”—was clearly aimed at ChatGPT, though OpenAI’s chatbot wasn’t called out by name.
