A lot has been made of Burger King’s recent ad titled “Women Belong in the Kitchen.” If you’ve heard about it, you’ve likely already taken sides and are either itching to rage-tweet me, or are eager to hear someone else who supports your point of view.  Instead of taking sides, let’s be objective and unpack this thing one step at a time.

For anyone who doesn’t know, or didn’t read past the headline, Burger King was announcing the establishment of a new scholarship called H.E.R. (Helping Equalize Restaurants) to aid aspiring female employees who want to pursue careers as Chefs. The timing of its release coincided with International Women’s Day. 

Here’s the ad that ran as a full page in The New York Times:

First, let’s clarify what the ad was meant to do.  And we can do so by remembering what ALL ads are meant to do: get your attention. And this headline, while controversial if it stood alone, does that very well, because it’s dangerous. Because it’s a trope. Advertising leverages drama because it leads the reader to a destination that’s equal parts entertaining and attention-getting. And because a headline that reads “Burger King launches new scholarship to aid female representation in restaurant kitchens” is neither.  That sort of thing is for a press release, not an advert.

From a craft point of view, this is a strong headline, in that it serves to do at least one job that all good headlines should perform: it summarizes the content that follows. If we’re being objective, (and we agreed that we would be,) this is a very good all-copy ad-nouncement.

Now, let’s look at where it went wrong: in a word, Twitter. When the brand (and the agency behind it,) wanted to extend this exciting conversation online, it took to Twitter and Burger King’s 1.9 million followers with the initial tweet. Which, sadly, was just the headline. It then tweeted a summary of the content that follows in the ad. [Important note: the tweets were initially “debated” on @BurgerKingUK.] While Burger King did clarify the headline tweet in subsequent posts, it was apparently the string of ugly comments in the conversation thread that got out of control. The entire thread has since been deleted, and an apology was issued by global CMO Fernando Machado.

Ad culture meets Twitter culture and fails.  Cancel culture meets Burger King and shuts it down. This whole thing has gotten off the rails, and I think it’s mostly because people are not taking anything beyond face value. I would argue that we need a context culture more than anything else these days.  An army of fact checkers and industry experts who could act as docents for a whole generation of people who seem to crave being offended, and who magically find a fix on social media at roughly the rate of every news cycle.

The ad, the subsequent Twitterstorm, and the media kerfuffle that followed it have become new facets in the cultural touchstone that is today’s cancel-happy culture. The sad part is, it’s a pretty good ad. And Burger King, as a restaurant chain, (whether we should call them a “restaurant” or not is a different subject altogether,) is trying in earnest to do a darn good thing in the face of an inequality on which they are wholly qualified to comment. It’s a shame that we’re dealing with this level of bullshit from a minority of wokesters when a brand decides to put its money into something that might actually help in a concrete way what is, in this case, a marginalized segment of the population.

Now let’s look at what’s REALLY wrong with this ad: the typesetting is insulting, and should be cancelled immediately! The face is what it is – Burger King’s going for the retro-hip thing with the old bubble letters logo. Fine. I’ll concede that for the sake of the old-is-new branding mission.

But lord, where is the copyfitting? When the creative director was reviewing this, didn’t he or she think, “hmmm…that’s a weird place for a hyphen?” In the middle of the name of your new scholarship, in the middle of what’s arguably the most important word (Equalize,) you couldn’t break the line differently? And then again, in the last line of the ad, in another important word (kitchen) we couldn’t hard kern a little bit?

After a week of debating the merits of this approach, I haven’t heard any ad geeks talking about this.  Why? If we’re being objective, there’s probably a conspiracy afoot.