Our main target was male and female teens and young adults. We needed to strengthen our relationship with these young consumers who already eat at Burger King, but both the brand and the agency thought this was a unique opportunity to create a bond with new customers. Our audience spends a lot of time browsing social medias and aren't afraid to express personal thoughts and beliefs. These people love to take part in events, festivals, parades, and they’re constantly registering these moments and sharing them with friends.

We needed to promote Burger King's new tagline "BE YOUR WAY", use it as an ignition for conversations around acceptance and equal rights, and get people to our stores. To achieve all of this, we decided to let our own products talk. With a simple change in one of our flagship products - wrapping the Whopper with the colors of the rainbow -, we managed to get our message across, sell burgers, and get people to use our own product as a token, a souvenir, an ignition of conversation around acceptance and equal rights. All with a core material of our company: our wrappers.

Our idea was to ignite the conversation about equal rights and the brand's new tagline using the brand's own product. We thought that, if Burger King could build over 200000 different burgers, it accepts any burger, no matter what it is. So we invited people to try a new one: the Proud Whopper, a Whopper wrapped with the colors of the rainbow. When opened,the wrapper revealed a message: "We are all the same inside." People flocked the BK store selling the Proud Whopper, a store at 8th and Market in San Francisco, exactly where the parade ends. The reactions during the whole process of buying the burger, unwrapping, and discovering the message generated an online film, which spread through social medias and mass media publications.

In just one week, the Proud Whopper reignited conversation about equal rights, generating over 7 million views, 1.1 billion impressions worth $21 million in earned media, over 450 thousand blog mentions, and became the #1 trending topic on Facebook and Twitter. According to IPSOS research, the Proud Whopper reached 1 out of every 5 Americans. The wrappers became souvenir people took home and a true symbol of acceptance, taking over Instagram, and even being sold on EBAY for up to US$ 1,000. The film with people’s reactions to the launch of this “new” burger also generated hundreds of response videos online. In short, the Proud Whopper became a true proclamation of equality.

After decades using the same tagline "HAVE IT YOUR WAY", Burger King decided it was time to push it further. So, in May 2014, the brand came out with its new positioning: "BE YOUR WAY". Our objective was to promote this change and use it to ignite conversation about acceptance and equal rights around the world. But how does a fast food chain that sells burgers get people to talk about equality?