Dive Brief:

• Burger King in Brazil has introduced a Poop Emoji Ice Cream product to promote its recent announcement that its ice creams and desserts are 100% free of artificial ingredients, per details emailed to Marketing Dive.
• As its name suggests, the ice cream product resembles the "poop" emoji, complete with eyes and mouth. It is only available this season via a special ice cream truck, with the company still deciding whether to make it a permanent menu item. The product was created by agency David São Paulo.
• The zany new product is Burger King's latest campaign around its pledge to remove artificial ingredients from its foods and comes amid the QSR chain's creative review.

Dive Insight:

Burger King's latest marketing stunt looks to draw attention to the chain's artificial ingredient-free dessert menu with an effort centered around an emoji most brands — especially restaurant ones — would usually steer clear of. The push is certainly more out-there than the celebrity-backed Keep It Real Meals Burger King used to highlight the elimination of 120 artificial ingredients from its menu, but for a QSR chain known for controversial campaigns, Poop Emoji Ice Cream makes a blunt point about its menu.

"It's better to look like a poop on the outside than to be stuffed with lots of bad ingredients on the inside," Rogério Chaves, creative director at David São Paulo, said in a statement.

The Poop Emoji Ice Cream product was created by the same brand and agency that teamed up in 2020 for the Moldy Whopper, an effort that promoted the removal of artificial preservatives with a burger overgrown with blue and green mold. Unsurprisingly, that campaign received a mixed response from consumers, but generated higher attention than the category norms and was widely recognized as one of the best campaigns of the year.

For the last several years, David has created similarly buzz-worthy campaigns for Burger King in Brazil, including a 2019 mobile effort that offered app users a free Whopper for virtually setting fire to the ads of its rivals and a June 2020 push that rewarded people for staying home early in the pandemic with a "Lockdown Whopper."

Despite the buzz and awards generated by these campaigns, Burger King this year put its creative and media accounts up for review. Alongside David, Dentsu's 360i, David's WPP sibling Ogilvy and independents O'Keefe, Reinhard & Paul and Fig are participating in the review, per Ad Age. The reviews follow nearly a year of marketing executive shakeups and Q4 2021 U.S. same-store sales growth that lagged far behind arch-rival McDonald's.