When McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski sat down to promote the brand's new 'Big Arch' burger earlier last year, both he and the marketing team probably expected a nice, routine, light-hearted bit of forgettable social media content. Instead, they got a case study in how quickly brand messaging can spiral online.
Posted in early February (although it didn't go viral until March), the clip shows Kempczinski taking a notably small, nay, minuscule, bite of the massive burger before delivering a carefully scripted endorsement. The whole thing didn't exactly scream "authentic", and ended up receiving the mother of all roastings online.
From Kempczinski's hesitation to his repeated use of the word "product", the video was an embarrassment of riches for online trolls, and, of course, fast food rivals. Burger King was quick to respond with a tongue-in-cheek video featuring its own CEO confidently biting into a Whopper.
Indeed, so significant was the backlash to the original video that Kempczinski was forced to address it directly this week. In a video interview with Wall Street Journal (below), in a bid for redemption, he took a bite from a McNugget. How did he do this time?
"The nugget bite was worse than the burger one," one Instagram user commented," while a TikTok viewer chimed in, "Damage control not working". Another commenter added, "Bro looks scared to eat his own 'product'".
In the same interview, Kempczinski attempted an explanation. By which we mean, he blamed his mother. The CEO told WSJ, "I blame it all on my mom because she told me, ‘Don’t talk with your mouth full. And I think, probably in that case, I should have just said, ‘You know what? To hell with it. I’m gonna go talk with my mouth full."
While the whole debacle is obviously pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of, well, everything, it does provide some interesting lessons about the current state of social media advertising for brands.
It's curious that, in today's world of TikTok videos and content creators, brands are becoming increasingly keen to wheel out their executives, perhaps in an an attempt to humanise their brands. But as the response to Kempczinski's video shows, it takes more than a few scripted words of enthusiasm to look authentic. Unlike influencers, most executives probably don't have the performance skills for short-form content. The C in CEO doesn't stand for charisma.
