Search »

Burger King: Sexual Captions an Honest Mistake

Sexual double entendres were removed overnight from Burger King’s new website, CoqRoq.com, but the company claims it has received no complaints from consumers or other outside groups, AdAge reports. The deleted content included captions, under photos of young women, that read: “Groupies love the Coq” and “groupies love Coq.” The captions were there when the site went live yesterday, but according to Edna Johnson, SVP for global communications for Burger King, malfunctions in the Flash and XML programming were responsible for putting the captions up. A misspelling of “Burger King” had also been fixed, she said.

 

The site, created by Crispin Porter & Bogusky of Subservient Chicken fame, is designed to look like a rock band site. (The band is named CoqRoq, the lead singer Fowl Mouth.)

Chris Carroll, SVP and director of marketing for Subway’s Franchisee Advertising Fund Trust pointed out that there’s a fine line between getting the attention of the core target and offending the masses. But Ralph Norman Haber, partner, Human Factors Consultants and an expert on subliminal advertising, said there’s nothing subliminal in the site that men and women appear to be targeted equally.

“Everybody is picked on and it’s kind of fair game,” he said. “I think it’s probably an effective ad.”