WHOPPER SACRIFICE

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Chapter: Food For Thought

In 2009, Burger King, together with advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, introduced a Facebook application called the Whopper Sacrifice. The concept was essentially this: Delete ten of your Facebook friends and received a coupon for a free Whopper. Each time you remove someone, it’s posted in your news feed.
    The application was used by 82,000 people, who together ended over 230,000 friendships on Facebook in just seven days. According to the developer however, a week after the Whopper Sacrifice made the news for its creative (and aggressive) use of Facebook friend removals as a way to spread the application, Facebook forced Burger King to disable the application’s functionality.


Possible Moral
With social networks like Facebook taking the term “friends” to new levels in the digital world, it’s easy to wonder what a friend is, by today’s measure. The obsession of amassing “friends” creates the impression that some users are wildly more sociable than others. But while we may be able to count 5,000 friends on the online social networking site, scientists have shown that humans brains are capable of managing a maximum of just 150 friendships. That means people with more friends than that must have many that can be sacrificed. So, at the end of the day – who would you delete for a burger?


Story from We All Need Heroes: Stories of the Brave and Foolish.
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