Years ago, the Burger King Corporation tried to connect with the kids, which is how I’m sure they put it during the marketing meeting. “What are we doing to connect with the kids?” asked a senior vice president.
“Glad you asked. We have a meeting scheduled to tackle that,” answered an executive vice president.
So, a meeting was convened and consultants were hired, and they created something they called the Burger King Kids Club, which they stocked with a fictionalized group of animated children whose exploits they featured in commercials. It was like a minishow starring a fun group of cartoon friends that took place in and around a Burger King franchise.
The children in the real Burger King Kids Club — and I promise I am not making this up — were exactly what you’d expect from someone making a parody of the Burger King Kids Club.
There was Kid Vid, a white kid, video gamer, and tech enthusiast. He was the leader of the group because, well, I mean, privilege? Hello?
But wait. There was also diversity. There was Boomer, a tomboy who loved sports, and an African American child named Jaws who loved to eat. Jazz was an Asian girl who played, yes, a musical instrument. And well before illegal immigration was a hot topic, the marketing team at Burger King addressed the issue with Lingo, a bilingual Mexican American boy. “Lingo,” weirdly, sounds a lot like the Spanish word for “tongue,” so maybe they could have spent five more minutes on that one. And finally, in an effort to be truly inclusive, there was a boy in a wheelchair. His nickname was Wheels.
Just try to calculate, for a moment, the number of meetings it took to come up with that concept and those characters. Try, for a second, to estimate the hours spent in offsite conferences, brainstorming sessions, late-night creative meetings with dry-erase boards and trust falls, focus groups, and moments when tempers flared.
“Um, guys, you know that ‘Lingo’ in Spanish sounds like —“
“We don’t have time for your negativity, Linda! Be constructive!”
And I’m sure there were triumphant moments too, such as when someone broke the tense and defeated silence with an “I got it! I got it! They call him … Wheels!”
Look, it’s easy to mock. And the truth is, we should just be grateful they spelled Kids Club with a K and a C, rather than a K and a K, like I’m sure they planned to until someone in one of the offsite brainstorming sessions, probably that awful Linda person, noticed that Burger King Kids Klub looks a lot like Burger KKK. Different thing entirely. Not so appealing.
The Burger King Kids Club was, by any show business measure, a hit. The commercials ran for about 10 years, through several different hairstyle crazes and almost all the way to the skinny jean era, which, in the spirit of full disclosure, is longer than any television series that I have ever created has lasted. It’s unclear whether it connected with the kids, or repositioned the brand, or did any of the things it set out to do. That’s always the problem with creative marketing schemes — you only really know if they fail disastrously.
Burger King, like most other franchise-based operations, is really two companies. There’s the main company, which does the marketing and the branding and the figuring out how to connect with the younger generation, and there are the franchisees, which are mostly run by local business people. The marketing people like to come up with creative ideas that have impact. The local guys, for the most part, like to keep things simple: fade in, show the burger, hot and juicy, show the bottle, droplets of condensation, show the consumer enjoying the product, fade out. Boring. But effective.
But no meetings needed. No offsite retreats, no brainstorming sessions, no trips to visit the design team in Manhattan, where you can also catch Hamilton and stay an extra day. No special status around the office (“Sorry, can’t pitch in on that. I’m too deep in the Kids Club Initiative. Ask Linda, she seems to have more free hours.”) and no fun swag at the big media launch. You don’t need any of that if you’re just showing pictures of a hamburger, glistening heroically against a white background.
Which is why there will always be, in pretty much every business, a Burger King Kids Club. Of one kind or another.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
