Jim Cornette broke down Burger King’s new advertising campaign on The Jim Cornette Drive-Thru, describing the fast food chain’s Oscar night commercials as an apology to America for years of declining quality.
Cornette said Burger King bought multiple spots during the Oscars broadcast, including what he estimated was a 60- to 90-second lead commercial, and used the airtime to acknowledge that the chain had fallen off.
“Burger King not only sponsored the Oscars, Burger King bought apologies, not commercials,” Cornette said. “Burger King apologized to America on the Oscars for sucking.”
Cornette described the commercial in detail, saying it opened with nostalgic clips from Burger King’s golden era before pivoting to an admission that things had gone wrong.
“The commercial starts out with all of the clips from the commercials from the glory days: the 60s, the 70s, maybe even the 80s, when you see all of the cool kids cruising through the parking lot on their way to the sock hop, and everybody’s having a good time, and these big giant burgers with grease dripping out of them, and it’s America on a sunny day,” Cornette said.
“And then they got, I think the phrase was, ‘And then somehow, we lost our way.’”
Cornette said the visual that accompanied the admission was striking. “Imagine a video camera low on the ground in an empty Burger King parking lot looking at the restaurant. And like some kind of Sergio Leone Western from the 60s, an empty soft drink cup, like a tumbleweed, in slow motion, is blowing across the parking lot,” he said. “‘We lost our way.’”
Cornette said the campaign then shifted into a relaunch message, including firing the King mascot.
“‘But now we’re back baby, and we’ve listened to you,’” Cornette said. “They fired the King. They booted the King out. They showed him, ‘You’re fired,’ and the King’s sitting there all dejected because he’s unemployed now. ‘You are our bosses now.’ They’ve made the babyface appeal to the people, the surveys of what we should do to fix our burgers. And now the Whopper’s back.”
Cornette summarized the strategy as Burger King spending a fortune to publicly acknowledge the problem during one of the most-watched broadcasts of the year. “Yeah, we sucked for a while, but now we’re not gonna suck anymore,” he said. “Which remains to be seen whether that’s, you know, as it goes.”
Co-host Brian Last asked if the campaign included any specifics on what was actually changing. Cornette said the company has been running surveys on what customers disliked and claims to have addressed the biggest complaints, but he noted that the commercials did not address operational issues at individual locations.
“They’re listening to the people about what they don’t like about the burger and they’ve made changes,” Cornette said.
Last offered his own take, saying Burger King already has the best burgers among the top three fast food chains and should lean into that. “When you compare them to McDonald’s and Wendy’s, the other two top competitors, Burger King has the best burgers,” Last said. “They should just run with that and make them bigger and better. That should literally be the slogan.”
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