Whopper Sacrifice

By now, most everyone has either heard of, or checked out the new Whopper Sacrifice effort by Crispin. I really like this latest effort. Here are some of my thoughts.....

Positives
1. They broke out of the traditional advertising model and used Social Media to promote the Whopper brand. For Crispin, this is a big win.
2. They spent pennies on the dollar to create and seed this effort versus producing a large national tv/print/radio campaign.
3. Everybody I know has heard about this..... ahh yes, the power of social media.
4. Every blogger in the ad world has picked up on this.
5. Rather than just "checking-the-box "and creating a "Whopper Facebook Page" they went one step further and created an actual application.
6. They built a small microsite to promote the effort and easily link users directly to Facebook to download the app. Very smart.

Negatives
1. As much as I like it, once again the Whopper brand is associated with something negative (de-friending your friends on Facebook). Then again, I can finally get rid of some of my Facebook friends that I really don't want.
2. They did not use SEM (Paid Search) to help drive users to their microsite. They spend all this money on the application, but when I type it into Google, they haven't bought SEM to ensure they are on the very top of the Google search results. Um, that is a big FAIL in my book.
3. And, as with typical ad agencies, they just don't understand SEO. The microsite isn't search engine friendly.... at all. Yeah, it looks good, but looking good isn't going to help customers find it (especially without SEM). Another FAIL.

Thoughts? Come on people, clickity-click the comments link.