What have you done for me lately? I’m not sure our friendship is what it used to be. It’s not you; it’s me. Would I rather 1) continue our superficial online friendship, or 2) drop you and enjoy a tasty Burger King Whopper?
If your ears were burning earlier this week, it’s because I was evaluating our Facebook (FB) friendship as part of Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice campaign.

The ingenious campaign challenges users to sacrifice 10 FB friends in exchange for a snail-mailed Burger King (BK) Whopper coupon. With two clicks, the application is added to your FB profile and populates your full friend list for what I was calling “Cheeseburger Inquisition 2009.”

It’s hard to describe the sinful pleasure of playing master of my online domain by hand picking which friends stay and which friends go. As I watch their profiles go up in a cloud of flames, I can almost taste the flame-broiled goodness.

  • Old college friend who hasn’t updated since 2007? Sacrificed!
  • Random guy I met at a conference who posts pictures of his cats all the time? Sacrificed!
  • Co-worker from down the hall who borrowed my tape and forgot to return it last week? Sacrificed!

Upon each sacrifice, your FB profile timeline shares these unfriendings for your entire network to see, and your newly former friends receive a notification letting them know you essentially consider them worth 1/10th of a Whopper. Ouch!

Of course, each of these nofitications has a link to the promotion, which is helping its popularity spread.

After sacrificing your 10 friends, you “Claim Your Whopper” by providing BK with your full name and address, mobile phone number, birthday, gender, how many times a month you frequent BK and how many children you have. You can also opt-in for SMS and e-mail alerts. Mining this type of information from BK brand advocates is essentially database gold.

After a splash screen stating the two-to-four week Whopper deliver delay, BK directs you to another campaign — their new Whopper Virgins microsite, featuring taste tests in exotic locations with people who have never experienced the joy that is biting into a juicy burger.

This isn’t Burger King’s first foray into viral legend. Four years later, Subservient Chicken is still inspiring spin-offs, while campaigns like Whopper Freakout, Coq Roq (now dormant) and Dr. Angus Intervention (now dormant) have all explored the potential of viral marketing.

But this latest campaign is the first I’ve encountered that allows me to personally create an openly and admittedly selfish outcome by hurting my friends, and I’ll admit it’s terribly inspiring.
Clever, relevant and a bit perverse, Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice has me re-evaluating my entire online friendship philosophy.

And you thought I was in it for the sandwich? Well, maybe both.

UPDATE: Facebook blocks Whopper application