In May 2020, we found out that due to autopilot software bug, some autonomous cars confused Burger King signs with stop signs - and, naturally, tried to stop at our restaurants.

Of course we made a promo out of that!

Whopper becomes the first burger officially craved by AI — because smart cars seem to be smart enough to stop for it.

The primary target was well-defined - early adopters of technology and smart transportations; everyone whose auto-piloted car was affected by the manufacturer's bug.

But our PR bet was on a much wider audience of car lovers & geeks, who took the conversation first to major car news outlets (Automotive News, Jalopnik, CNET among others) and clean mobility/new mobility media websites and forums like Teslarati, Electrek, Cleantechnica - where huge fanbases for autonomous vehicles & emission-free mobility took it further down social media channels.

All in all, almost every automotive news outlet in the US and all major automotive media around the world have posted/reposted a news about our campaign and the whole discussion of a larger Autonomous Vehicle safety topic was always in connection with our brand, as you can notice in our case materials or just if you google "AutopilotWhopper".

We created a campaign consisting of drivers' footage of Tesla glitches where the cars would stop near BK locations, thinking BK sign was a stop sign. Using these materials, we ran a one-day whopper giveaway for any smart car owner who has the same problem.

The media then picked the story up and turned it into a PR story, because autonomous vehicles are a hot and controversial topic.

According to our estimation based on news coverage, especially the larger ones like CNET, Forbes, Insider, Autonews.com, more than 10 million people read/heard about the activation within the first week, including more than 1M tweet views on the launch. Overall the free media that we got covered USA, EU, Latin America, Australia, Russia among others, and is expected to have generated at least 100 million impressions worldwide.