Simpsons' Burger King Sponsorship Doesn't Fit With Other Deals Such as 7-11, Vans and JetBlue

The Simpsons movie is coming to theaters on July the 27th. If you didn't know this by now, shame on you. I've talked in a recent post about the lack of inspiration from 7-11 to turn their stores into Kwik-e-Marts, and about the "become a simpsons character" competition that is just a re-run of "Who shot Mr Burns?", which turned out (the competition) to be a total failure.

However, 7-11 doesn't stand alone: Vans has joined the advertising effort to promote the movie, along with Jet Blue and Burger King. The Fox Networks said they were not interested in lining up as many partners as possible, but rather have the right partners in the right context and the right message. All the selected partners match this motivation, except for Burger King, and here is an explanation:

The Simpsons are fully integrated into the American pop culture, and no huge marketing stunt is required to make the movie a success. The goal of Fox was 1. to find advertising partners who could deploy a great original promotional event, something that would really add value to the movie, and 2. partners whose customers demographics fit with the shows' demographics.

7-11 (think Homer) is a grocery store, serving mainly junk food, perfect for the youth, singles and obese. Turning their stores into Kwik-e-Mart was ingenious enough to become a partner.

Vans (think Bart) is a skater clothes brand: no doubt here that their demographics are in affinity with the Simpsons'. Plus Vans is working on launching a line of limited edition shoes that will probably turn into collectibles.

JetBlue is an airline promoting their services through humorous messages. They have a great affinity with the Simpsons' anti-corporate profile, and the will play Simpsons episodes during their flights, as well as inserting messages from the Simpsons characters inside their website. Fair enough.

Now how about Burger King? Well first of all, google Burger King and Simpsons, you will find out there is no results associated with the movie. Burger King is running co-branded TV ads to support The Simpsons Movie. It will feature a line of Simpsons toys in kids meals, advertise its Ultimate Double Whopper as Homer's favorite Whopper and feature in-store point-of-sale materials. Actually, Burger King is so busy with promoting Transformers and Spiderman 3, there is not a single word about the Simpsons on their website.

My question is: If other brands have to go through all those efforts to benefit from supporting the movie, why is Burger King getting away with traditional advertising? How come they do not have to turn their stores into Krusty Burgers? Why aren't they playing the anti-corporate game?

Well first, let's not forget that the Simpsons airs on Fox, which belongs to Murdoch's News Corporation. Murdoch's company and Burger King Holding are closely related. They had already joined forces in 2006 to provide to the 75 million users of Myspace two download-to-own episodes of the Fox drama at no cost from a special "Have It Your Way" page provided by "Burger King".

Actually, Burger King and the News Corporation are good buddies: In 2000, Burger King helped launch FoxKids.com, a popular Web sites for children ages 6-14, where kids had the chance to play "Burger Blitz", an exclusive Burger King game on the Fox Kids' site. This interactive game allowed kids to "click and drag'' Whopper® ingredients to build their favorite burger.

In 2005, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie ordered repeatedly hamburgers at Buger King drive-thrus for the show Simple Life 2. And this is just a list to illustrate my point. It has hard to access the advertising budget details of big corporations. Burger King invests 4% of its revenues in advertising, which makes about $80 million.

It ain't that much for a corporate advertising budget, but I wouldn't be surprised if most of it went to the News Corporation advertising solutions.

All this talk to argue the fact that while 7-11, Vans and Jetblue are busting their asses on smart advertising, Burger king is doing the same corporate crap over and over again. Moreover, the Fox team wanted to stay in this anti-corporate spirit, but it seems that sometimes, there's nothing you can do but to have it their way.

D'ohh!