The Campaign
AI slop of some CDs talkin’ football while Betty Draper does all the work.
Burger Barn had come to their advertising agency, Coleman, Kelley, and Burnette, with struggling sales under a cloud of cultural irrelevancy. The ask was to increase the bottom line and give the menu a refresh. Burger Barn had been forced to take stock after falling to fifth place on Quick Serve Restaurant Monthly's list of best Large Franchise QSR Burgers. There had already been a couple of rounds of ideas, but no one, least of all Adam, had been able to crack the campaign and proof in the form of discarded commercial scripts now peppered the floor in his boss's office like cheap carpet.
"Is there a brief?" Adam asked his creative director, Joe, a punchy middle-aged guy in black rimmed glasses and koi fish arm sleeve tattoos that made him feel anti-establishment.
"There is, but it's shit. Between you, me, and McGee, the accounts people on this are up their own asses and don't have a map to get back. Just come up with something press worthy," said Joe. "Short of killing someone," he added. It was said in jest, but even months later, Adam never got over the irony of the request.
Right up to that point, working at Coleman, Kelley, and Burnette had been an idea bloodbath. Every day, was someone asking Adam for something by five only to reduce that day's output into thirty minutes of polite, soul crushing rejection. "That's interesting." "That's close to being something." "I've seen this kind of thing before." Maybe if there'd been some wins, but the job was one fuck off after another. It was as though Adam was on an endless cycle of speed dates, desperate for love while living with a giant goiter on his face. His parents wanted him to go to law school, but it just didn't jive with him. He remembered hearing some comedian say, "If you work in advertising, kill yourself." The comment had felt like a dare to his contrarian brain. Despite its professional reputation being somewhere on par with car salesmen, advertising was still cooler to Adam than sitting around in a suit all day har-haring with some Ivy League stiffs.
Adam sat there Monday morning, slumped to be precise, in an Eames plywood chair paid for by the proceeds of some other writer's sweat. He needed to get his creative juices flowing, so he decided to get up off his ass and walk over to the coffee shop kitty corner the agency to start riffing on ideas for the Burger Barn campaign. He ordered a drip coffee because a latte wasn't in his budget and the barista handed him his change. Adam looked down at the tip jars on the counter. One was labeled 'M&M's' and the other had a picture of Eminem. He thought it was clever. You could vote for one of the two with a tip. He dropped his last quarter in the jar with the angry white rapper. As he did, he considered a third option: inspiration. He picked a wobbly table in the corner (next to an old lady who might've been homeless) and opened his notebook to work.
It was an election year. The country was low on faith in the system and big on grievances. There was a new thing to fight over every day and elections every couple of years were hardly enough to satiate the collective rage. Adam looked at the tip jars and how you could vote with your wallet. He wondered if people might be more excited to buy lunch if they could share their opinions. He uncapped his pen like he was signing the Magna Carta and started chipping away at the blank page. It started with The Right Wings and The Progressive Chicken Sandwich. Then came a Patriot Burger with liberal tears or conservative rage sauce. The ideas kept flowing long after the woman next to him fell asleep and started snoring at her table, confirming his first instinct on her dwelling status. At the heart of the campaign was its big, press worthy payoff – a giant digital billboard in Times Square that would tell the story of what was on America's mind via Burger Barn sales. A big goddamn ticker tracking the nation's two cents. Public opinion wrapped in cardboard fast food containers. The headline on the board read Vote with your stomach, America. Not your head.
Adam sold his bosses on the idea and the Burger Barn marketing team showed up the following Monday on a flight from Miami via Dallas ready to hear the idea that had the agency folks so thrilled with themselves.
Dan Mandlebaum was the Chief Marketing Officer of Burger Barn and the kind of guy who hugged everyone he met. He knew there was an appetite for an edgy new campaign, but his heart lay in the product. He'd been eating Barn Burgers since he was yay high to a june bug and just wanted the rest of America to see what he saw: a top three QSR burger. After a morning getting to know their new ad agency, the afternoon was reserved for the work. Adam took them through the campaign with the enthusiasm of a spin class instructor. He'd even been promoted for the occasion, now getting the kind of salary that bought lattes.
“We have to launch with a proclamation! Remember ‘you’re either with us or against us?' We'll do the same with chicken. There is no waffling, there's only your hunger.”
Adam channeled his inner P.T. Barnum and sold Dan Mandlebaum on a 360 campaign that would put Burger Barn back in the top three. Commercials, billboards, radio, in-store rebranding – every surface would be reimagined to put the nation to a taste test of their political inclinations.
It began with one of those TV anthems that was longer than all the other commercials and featured the voice of America – a deep, reassuring voice – male, prototypically white, most recently selling trucks, but now recruited to sell the country on the idea that to be hungry was to be American. The voice had a drawl and told everyone that the country had lost its way. The price of milk, school teachers with pink hair – the average Dick and Sue didn’t feel like they had a voice – except they did, they could order from Burger Barn. The commercial was directed by the guy who made that movie with all the superheroes coming together to save earth. It debuted during The Big Game and was seen by over one hundred million Americans. They even posted QR codes on social for a free four piece Save the Planet Tenders or five piece Frackin' Good Nuggets. Every order was posted on the big board in Times Square to show what America was feeling. "People ate it up" said AdWeek in a particularly lazy recap.
The Burger Barn campaign rollout began on a Tuesday at Darrell Powers’s franchise in Bradenton, Florida. He'd been doing pretty well, hiring six new team members that month. His wife even suggested it was time to buy a boat. So he was peeved when the cops called him in the middle of dinner to tell him what happened. He drove down there in his Chevy Tahoe that they'd just purchased because they were expecting a third child. He drove that thing down there as fast as he could.
The restaurant was empty and there was dried blood about six feet from the ketchup and napkin stand. He walked up to the counter where a pair of cops were already interviewing Darrell's shift manager Alfonso. The lady cop was writing up his statement, while the short cop with a mustache just stood there with his thumbs in his waistline trying to follow what Alfonso had to say.
Alfonso shook his head in frustration and suggested they all just go back in the office and take a look at what happened on the video monitors.
"See this guy in the poncho came in with this family. They were ordering from the red menu, excuse me, from the blue menu. They were all eatin' chicken sandwiches." Alfonso was nervous. Darrell could hear it in his voice.
"Just relax, tell us what happened next."
"They went and sat down next to these guys who started talkin'." Alfonso pointed to a pair of blurry good old boys on the screen.
"I didn't know why the dad hit 'em, but I found out after that these guys were mad because of the color of their fry box and they were swearing about it. The mom covered the little girl's ears. Her brother wasn't scared though. He watched it all go down, he liked watching his dad beat this guy."
They watched the video.
"Wow, that kid is watchin' this thing like a referee," said the short cop.
It wasn’t the fight that was the problem for Darrell Powers, but the media storm that followed. It was one of those stories that ended up on news aggregate sites under the catchy headline ‘Chicken Sandwich turns to Knuckle Sandwich’ and gathered steam across the internet. By day's end it was just one of a hundred such stories from Portland to Kalamazoo.
America was at war with itself.
Joe LaFleur promoted Adam Laslo to Associate Creative Director right around the time the fighting hit the airwaves on CNN. He was always the type to reward hard work and in Adam he saw a creative who shared his enthusiasm for rule breaking.
“All press is good press, right?” Adam felt safe saying what he'd heard from his heroes for years. Joe hurmph'd like it was the first time he'd heard the phrase.
Dan Mandlebaum and the Burger Barn team returned to the agency on a Tuesday morning flight. He sat across from Mollie in PR, who looked stressed in her very trendy slacks and wool sweater. Adam looked at her and wondered how old she was. She was more mature than girls he dated (and she probably had a business card.) He considered whether he'd have a chance. Whether his new title might have upgraded his possible prospects. It probably had.
A gaunt energy hung over the reclaimed wood table as they got started. The feeling was like, shit, if we could just get through this.
“Maybe we issue a statement denouncing the violence,” said Dan Mandlebaum. He looked at Joe and the creative team and they stared back at him. Dan knew this look, he got it from the Burger Barn janitorial staff every time he asked them not to use Pine Sol on his desk.
“It’s not the worst idea. It is a war after all. That's not great for the brand.” said Mollie.
Adam let out an audible sigh before licking the jelly off his digits. Someone had brought in donuts, his favorite.
Joe re-introduced Adam, "Folks, you remember Adam, the campaign was his idea."
It was a weird thing to say. The words out of Joe's mouth almost sounded like an accusation. Like Adam alone should be taking credit for the exponential uptick in Burger Barn sales.
Thank you, Joe, thought Adam. “It’s not anyone's fault people are losing their minds,” he said out loud while enjoying the liberal amount of recline in his chair.
“I think people could blame us," said Dan Mandlebaum. "I'm just a little concerned about the optics."
Adam smelled his jelly fingers. “You make food that's so delicious, people fight over it. You're going to apologize for that?”
Dan Mandlebaum had to remind himself that this campaign was just a wrapper for something much more important, the delicious new menu. He'd been into his local Burger Barn three times in the past week for the Health Care is a Human Right Pimento Cheeseburger and had thought each time that if politics helped them break into the public consciousness then so be it. He couldn't abandon that for a case of the jitters.
Adam continued, this time getting a little jazzed by the optimistic tone in his own voice, "Across this country, people are showing up to buy delicious food and sharing their opinions with their neighbors. People that were otherwise disenfranchised now have a voice. Their cheeseburger speaks to their struggle. Their french fries say, 'I'm a person and that rumble isn't my stomach, it's my distaste for the status quo. Give me some change with my ketchup.'"
"People are also showing up to kill each other too. Seventeen deaths yesterday alone. Yeesh," said Mollie.
Adam looked over at her as she let out a heavy sigh of her own that really accentuated her chest and wool sweater. She forced a smile for Dan Mandelbaum who was also looking at Mollie's chest.
"Let's see how this plays out," said Dan, refocusing. "We can always come back and reassess."
They catered lunch for the agency, Burger Barn of course. Adam ordered the Trans Rights Tenders with Honey Mustard Sauce.
When the North and South came to blows at Gettysburg, they fought in a field. When the Red and Blue came to blows during week two of the campaign, they fought in Darrell Powers's Burger Barn parking lot in Bradenton. Ladies brought their pink AR-15 assault rifles, the men brought their camo. Darrell tried a white flag, a giant one that he'd bought and raised in his parking lot in place of old glory. It lasted about twelve hours before the reds came in and claimed all his hourly employees for their side. That lasted for twelve more hours before the blues won back the barn using chemical warfare in the form of homemade mustard gas cleverly disguised in a delivery of Burger Barn condiments. The body count was in the teens. His new Chevy was also killed. As far as Darrell Powers was concerned, the only winners were online delivery services who saw the civil unrest as a boon. Delivery drivers wore bright yellow helmets and vests that read 'Delivery' as they risked their lives to feed people between attacks. He wondered if any of them had got a raise. Probably not, he decided.
Across the country, Burger Barn fed America their future asses as Adam and the team back at Coleman, Kelley, and Burnette turned anything that didn't fit between two buns into content. They updated the Big Board, touting the numbers on every issue from climate to defense budgets. Tourists flocked to Times Square to see the what Americans thought of everything from abortion to composting. The board didn't reflect the national war dead, which was unofficially at eleven hundred and forty-six (that was excluding the deaths from burger induced cardiovascular events of which there were thirty-five.) They sent the CKB communications team to Washington where politicians lobbed their own bombs. Folks on Capitol Hill pointed fingers and shouted across the aisle, hurling blame for the war on the other side's constituents.
Week three, the agency got themselves trending when the president came in for a photo op and a cheeseburger at a local DC Burger Barn while out for a run. The secret service did a full audit of paying guests to make sure they'd all ordered liberal food before the big guy dolled out any handshakes and said wryly, "Whoever does the Burger Barn advertising are pretty smart. I should have them poll my chances with the First Lady tonight." The restaurant goers all had a hardy chuckle. It felt good to hear from their leader.
Also in Washington at the time was Darrell Powers, who'd fancied himself at Mister Smith type and come to tell his story to whomever would listen and stop the war. "...What I see is progressive voters ordering French fries on mass to support an escalation in defense spending. I see conservatives buying onion rings to support the second amendment. I have Super PACs calling me directly to buy up Burger Barn food and influence their numbers. We gotta call up homeless shelters to take all the extra food left behind when either party needs a polling bump. No big deal. All the jobs around us are drying up, so people show up to take free food off our hands all day long. Course they won't eat from the other side's box even if they're starving. That's the state of Florida, that's the state of America. I got a friend up north, owns a Burger Barn store in Moscow, Idaho. Some of his in-store signage was inadvertently sent to Moscow, Russia in an autocomplete error. You don't think foreign interference is a concern? It took corporate two weeks before anyone noticed that sales at Burger Barn Moscow had shot up by 5000%. They were buying up all the food to skew the numbers on the board. Russian Burger Barns influencing America burger polls! You think Burger Barn gives a ten pound bag of shit?"
That was the speech he practiced in his hotel room. He never got to give it as he was killed in a sleeping accident at his hotel that night. At least that's what the DC police report said.
While sales had eclipsed the GDP of small island nations, the folks at Burger Barn had finally begun to see their hockey stick sales growth level off. It may have had something to do with the rampant death and destruction around the country. Dan Mandlebaum decided he was gonna try and solve this problem the only way he knew how – with his appetite for innovation.
The armistice came shortly after the debut of the Quadruple Patty Togetherness with Cheese. It was a recipe designed with peace in mind. With its success, the country became so fat that lady liberty and her followers relaxed into a deep food coma.
That year, the agency won every advertising award around, culminating with a win at the prestigious Cannes Lions Advertising Awards. As Adam walked up to collect the hardware for Campaign of the Year, he told the tale of how the campaign had resulted in nearly four trillion dollars in earned media, roughly the GDP of India. No one knew if the tally was real, but it felt real. Adam's impassioned thank you speech skipped the nearly hundred thousand deaths during the Barn Wars and the millions more who would die of heart disease over the next decade. He kept it short and wrapped things up with a line he'd written early on in the campaign - You are what you eat, you cheeseburger. It made him chuckle at its stupidity. And its efficacy. He then pulled out a gun, shot himself in the head, and was posthumously inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame.
