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'What is the Whopper burger?': Burger King launches TV advert that hijacks your Google Home
'We thought this was a good way to make a connection and go directly to guests and tell a story about our product'
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Your support makes all the difference.Burger King has released a new TV advert designed to make viewers’ Google Home voice assistants advertise the company’s burgers.
The device, which only launched in the UK last week, listens to and quickly processes spoken commands, before firing the answers back at you.
It’s activated by the phrase, “Okay Google”, which the fast food company has decided to hijack.
In the ad, a person tells the camera that 15 seconds isn’t enough time to “explain all the fresh ingredients in the Whopper sandwich”.
He then adds, “But I got an idea. Okay Google, what is the Whopper burger?”
This will prompt the Google Home in viewers' living rooms to read out a description of the burger from Wikipedia.
It’s a clever but extremely intrusive ad, which will almost certainly inspire countless other companies.
Google Home users can counteract the ad by hitting the device's microphone mute button, but this also prevents it from listening out for their legitimate commands.
Google, which was heavily criticised last month when Google Home devices started recommending the Beauty and the Beast film to users, did not help Burger King create the advert.
“With the onset of consumers buying intelligent system devices and using them at home, we thought this was a good way to make a connection and go directly to guests and tell a story about our product,” José Cil, the president of Burger King, told the New York Times.
“We think about our guests’ perception and their perspective on how we interact with them, but on balance we felt this was a really positive way to connect with them.”
The advert will also trigger Google Assistant, which runs on a number of Android smartphones.
Google accidentally activated Home with its Super Bowl advert earlier this year, and Amazon did the same with a commercial about its own voice assistant, Alexa.
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