You don’t have to be a Burger King enthusiast, a Brit, a Burger King UK Twitter follower, or a woman to have seen — and cringed mightily at — the brand’s contribution to Monday’s International Women’s Day celebration.
BKUK thought it would be a great opportunity to kick off their new program(me) highlighting the lack of gender diversity in the restaurant industry, complete with a big fat scholarship to help female Burger King employees follow their dreams. The disparity is very real, and I’d argue that International Women’s Day isn’t a horrible time to announce the program. Unless you do it like this.
Oh, honey, no.
This didn’t have to happen.
Here’s how you can learn from their very, very ouchy mistake.
Run edgy creative by the team.
No, you can’t run every single tweet by the creative team. There’s no time. Our industry moves fast. But a national holiday, a major campaign, and an extremely edgy concept, all at the same time, warrant a few more eyes on the content. For something like this, you need to pass it around — to a diverse crowd — to make sure it doesn’t ping as racist, sexist, homophobic, or any other -phobic and can’t be turned into a sex joke.
Either this one wasn’t passed around, or the person (or people) who said, “Um, no, this is bad” was (were) ignored. And that’s no good. Maybe you think they’re being oversensitive and your “Woman, make me a sandwich” tweet is a clear winner, but the price of failure is high.
(I’ll also take this opportunity to stress the need for diversity and inclusion in the workplace. I don’t know how many women are on BKUK’s social media team specifically — it could be a total estrogen party over there — but someone should have had the opportunity and been empowered to say, “Oh, honey, no.”)
Make sure your creative can stand on its own.
As a whole, this series of tweets actually has a good message. It addresses the very real gender disparity in professional kitchens, and the fact that women are less likely to have positions of authority in said professional kitchens than men are. It’s important and valid, and the program sounds cool.
However.
The first tweet said the opposite of all that.
And there’s never a guarantee that people will read beyond the first tweet.
There’s no guarantee that people will ever consume the entirety, or even the majority, of a creative effort. So it’s important to make sure every execution can convey the concept without the rest of the campaign close at hand to provide context. The print element of the campaign, for instance, did start with the provocative headline, but the text underneath explained what the hell was happening, and it was right there, clearly an element of the overall message.
But a tweet? Even for a tweet with a whole thread beyond it, right there, the possibility that people are going to read it and get their dander up and not bother reading the rest of it is very, very high.
Moving one sentence from the rest of the tweet thread, or one idea, into the original tweet could have spared the BKUK marketing team a lot of misery. Put that sentence a couple of spaces down, to give the first sentence space to make its impact, and then hit them with the contrasting idea that makes the reader go, “OH MY EFFING — oh. Oh, that is good.”
Don’t get lost in your own brilliance.
We’re told, as baby creatives, to mind our egos and be prepared to kill our darlings. (Some of us take to this message better than others.) That is the ability to gaze upon your brilliance and say, “Holy shit, that’s clever. That is smart, and striking, and I love it,” and then to say, “but it’s not going to work.” Because even brilliant, clever things sometimes don’t work. Once you’re done self-admiring, you have to take the next step of giving it a good, honest look and determine if any changes might need to be made (and then make them) to take it live. Or, if absolutely necessary, not take it live.
I can see a creative (and social media counts as creative) standing back from that tweet thread and saying, possibly aloud, “That is brilliant. I’ve done a good job there.” And they did! But the next step would be to say, “Now, could this possibly be misconstrued? Do I need to make it a tiny bit less brilliant to make it more effective? And not, like, offend a ton of people on a national holiday?”
Don’t make it worse.
Following the mistake and the justifiable uproar, Burger King UK responded by taking down the tweet and apologizing, acknowledging that they got the tweet wrong. It wasn’t a great apology, because it mentioned that they were trying to promote their program, and “I’m sorry, but I was just trying to [X]” isn’t a great apology. It also isn’t a great apology because it only came after they did this:
Oh, honey, no.
“Why would we delete a tweet that’s drawing attention to a huge lack of female representation in our industry?” Because that’s not what it’s drawing attention to. It’s drawing attention to the disastrousness of the tweet itself and thus completely detracting from the positive intention. And y’all, “We thought you’d be on board with this as well” is All Pro passive aggression. That’s piling worse on top of awful.
Of course Burger King didn’t mean to offend its audience. That’s totally not on brand for them. But intent doesn’t matter when you’ve just celebrated International Women’s Day by declaring that women should be kitchen-bound housewives. And when your audience conveys its offense, Sorry you weren’t smart enough to get it is toward the top of the list of the absolute worst follow-up.
Advertising is hard, y’all. Except for the parts that aren’t.
Everyone with a Twitter account thinks they can do pro-level social media, and every social media marketing professional knows how very much NOT THE CASE that is. So yes, social media marketing is hard.
But not royally screwing up like this, from Step 0 all the way to Step Yowza, is easy.
And now you, my dear reader(s), know how easy it is. It’s as easy as asking yourself, “Does this sound like it could come from a Twitter feed full of tweets about how vaccines are full of microchips and the world was better before women were allowed in Congress? Maybe it could use just a scootch of editing. Like, just the tiniest scootch.”
Thank you for coming to my How Not to Do What Burger King Did seminar. If you included your email address when you registered, your certificate will arrive shortly. Don’t forget to pick up a t-shirt on the way out. And also, don’t tweet willfully and yet unintentionally sexist tweets ‘cause you’re trying to be edgy.