Thanks to Burger King, Andy Warhol got another 15 minutes of Fame!

Google Trend for Andy Warhol

Four and a half minutes of video, intended as pop art showing a famous deceased artist eating a Whopper – Cool! No wonder Burger King decided to do their first Superbowl Ad in a decade.

Playing it cool, just showing an unedited clip and a simple slogan – eat like Andy – seems a smart way to further differentiate the commercial from all of the other noise such as brand mascots being killed and mutilated, beers being hawked as health food, and boring burger ads. But I fear Burger King played it too cool.

I recognized Andy: I am old enough to remember his fame and I have a tie to Carnegie Mellon, his alma mater. But just how many viewers would? And are viewers my age good targets for whoppers? I am not sure I have eaten a whopper since Andy passed away.

I asked the 60 students in my social media marketing class and exactly ONE knew who the white-haired-guy-named-Andy in the Burger King commercial was. I think that the Venn diagram above, ripped from Twitter, nicely summarizes the overlap between Warhol fans and BK customers. (By the way, I hope to see more Venn diagrams on Twitter…)

A little bit of context, a simple introduction “a famous pop artist filmed himself eating a whopper – one of his gifts to the ages…” or some such thing would have made the ad more accessible to the audience. It might have been a LITTLE less cool, but some of the viewers might then appreciate the ad!

What do you think??

I do give the BK social media team credit for a clever response to a “fun fact” from AdWeek stating that Warhol had actually asked for a McDonald’s burger: