Dive Brief:

• If a recently laid off person can prove it on LinkedIn, Burger King will give them a free hamburger as a "Whopper Severance" in an offbeat social media effort, reported Adweek.
• To qualify for the free burger, LinkedIn users have to post, "I got fired. I want a free whopper. #WhopperSeverance," on the social media platform and they will be sent a link to register for a Whopper severance package sent via snail mail that includes a Burger King gift card. Consumers can also visit the site WhopperSeverance.com to participate. 
• The campaign was created by David in Miami, Burger King's creative agency, and the concept loosely ties together getting "fired" and the fact that the quick serve restaurant (QSR) uses fire to grill its hamburgers.

Dive Insight:

Getting fired is an unusual life event to tie a social media campaign to, but social media is a marketing channel that lends itself to outside-the-box thinking and trialing quirky ideas. And Burger King has been no stranger to unusual marketing campaigns lately across a variety of marketing channels as it looks to break through and get noticed. 

In fact, Burger King won this year's Cannes Lions award for Creative Marketer of the Year for a campaign that hijacked consumers' Google Home assistants. In discussing the award, the brand's head of brand marketing Fernando Machado told Fast Company that the brand is at its best when it is real, fun and edgy. The brand fails, he added, when its marketing becomes generic. 

In April, Burger King raised the ire of Google, Google Home users and Wikipedia with a TV spot that automatically triggered Google Home devices and Android smartphones via voice activation technology that caused Google Assistant to read the first lines of the Whopper’s Wikipedia entry. The QSR’s June entry into the Belgium market caused controversy with the country’s royal family by asking people to vote online for whether they preferred its brand icon or Belgium’s actual King Philippe. The effort ended when Burger King abdicated to the real king, declaring King Philippe had 51% of the vote.

Earlier this week, Burger King Russia announced a new rewards program where customers who buy Whoppers get a bitcoin derivative cryptocurrency called “WhopperCoin” in a digital wallet that can be traded for food at the restaurant or even traded online for monetary value.