BURN THAT AD
CLIENT
Burger King
SERVICES / TECHNOLOGY / SOLUTIONS
Burger King is the second-largest fast-food chain in the world, with over 15,000 restaurants in more than 100 countries and an average of 11 million customers every day. Burger King’s flagship product is the Whopper sandwich.
BK - Burn That Ad
CREATIVE CHALLENGE
The action was intended to advertise BK Express, the chain’s system that allows ordering online using the Burger King app. To achieve this, a special feature was needed within the app.
SOLUTION
With a past history of using competitors to develop marketing actions on, we created Burn that Ad: an app-based augmented reality campaign that uses the ads of Burger King’s biggest competitor as a trigger, and offered a free Whopper to each user that partook in the campaign.
TECHNICAL CHALLENGES
Revealing a coupon by capturing a competitor’s ad on the cell phone camera, using an augmented reality marker, and displaying this coupon in a responsive manner, considering that the markers could have different formats.
TECHNOLOGY
Revealing the Ad
The ad is revealed using an animation that simulates fire burning. This animation was made dynamically over two stages: the first would have the marker ad “burn off”; while the second would consist of a particle system simulating fire after the ad had burned off.
Marker Burning Off
The animation showing the marker burning up was made using a shader developed specially for this project. This shader is intended to show a circular burning animation following the proportions of the marker being captured by the cell phone camera.
Particle System
Fire particles had to look convincing and real enough to keep up the suspense of the reveal. Therefore, they had to simulate volume without hogging data. These volume particles required a specific shader for the particles interpolating the particle animation, situated between it and the camera’s position, changing its animation sequence to give the impression of volume.
RESULTS
In addition to being a major hit worldwide, the campaign earned VZLab the Grand Prix of WAVE Festival 2019 in the mobile category, nine Cannes Lions, and three Clio Awards.