How Russia’s One World Cup Advertisement Took It to a New Level
You are with your family, maybe your girlfriend, maybe your boyfriend, maybe both.
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The voice on the phone was uncharacteristic without the lilt, the sudden laugh, the optimism usually expressed. Who among us would be cheerful or express anything but a somber sense of helplessness when the “C” word is used in our diagnosis?
Suddenly, a Burger King advertisement comes on. It features soccer players, burgers, and an offer to the women of the USA: Get pregnant by a famous soccer star! Get free whoppers! And a cash prize!
Could you imagine? There’d be riots in the streets. They’ve burned down Burger Kings for far less.
But in Moscow, Russia in 2018, in the leadup to the World Cup, this was precisely the commercial that ran. It first appeared on the Facebook account for Burger King Russia:
“Burger King, within the framework of social responsibility, has appointed a reward for girls who get pregnant from the stars of world football. Each will receive three million rubles and a lifelong supply of Whoppers.
For these girls, it will be possible to get the best football genes, and will lay down the success of the Russian national team for several generations ahead. Forward! We believe in you!”
The offer translates to $47,000 in payment, in addition to those tasty whoppers.
The eugenics-style humor felt very “joking not joking,” dispatching young Russian women to play the role of sports vessel.
It stills begs the question: Even if this went down, is binge-eating whoppers the nutrition that will foster Adonis DNA?
The advertisement wasn’t as much of a joke as you’d think. There was an increase in unwed mothers following the Moscow, Olympics in 1980 (to international fathers who never to returned). A Russian lawmaker, Tamara Pletnyova, expressed concern with the impact of this ad on Russian women: “I know the children suffer, then they get abandoned and that’s it, they stay with their mom here.”
They are commonly referred to as “festival children,” the wave of births that happen nine months after international sporting events.
BK Russia ended up pulling their ad a few days after the condemnation. Per the Washington Post report:
“We are sorry about the clearly offensive promotion that the team in Russia launched online. As soon as it was brought to our attention, we had it removed. It certainly does not reflect our brand or our values and we are taking steps to ensure this type of activity does not happen again.”
It was a predictable response but their sincerity was questionable: this Burger King ad wasn’t a one-off incident.
For example, only one year prior, there’d been an ad featuring a rape victim:
Source: pic via Russia Today
The woman on the left is Diana Shurygina, during a talk show appearance. She alleged she’d been raped and beaten at a party. It was big news in Russia. The accused man was convicted and sentenced to eight years (and later reduced to three). As per usual with these cases, there was a ton of victim-shaming and shouting down of her accusations.
The pinching gesture with her hand refers to her answer to a question about how much vodka she’d had at the party. The Burger King ad used it to show the short duration of the offer (memes were often mocking her in that pose).
It caused a huge uproar in Russia, with many rape victims threatening to boycott Burger King.
Coming full circle to the impregnation advertisement, it wasn’t an oopsie. There has been other severely misplaced ads.
I can’t help but imagine the Burger King global head of marketing, sitting in his office in NYC, getting an email and saying, “Oh god, not Russia again.”
If you deconstruct the ad to its core, it’s pretty crude. Get pregnant by a soccer player. Become a single mom. Use your uterus for Mother Russia to make us better.
The economics of it don’t even make sense either. Statistically, raising a kid alone doesn’t bode well at the macro level. The cash and the whopper payment certainly won’t make up for the costs of single motherhood.
If they were 100% joking about the ad, I still don’t see the humor.
I’ve lived abroad and try to practice cultural sensitivity. But it’s incredible these ads bubble up past various levels of review. There seems to be a higher tolerance in Russia for this type of stuff.
From a marketing perspective, I still struggle to see how selling out your women to get pregnant has anything to do with hamburgers and getting more people to buy them. Or how doing any sort of rape reference, in any context, will ever have positive ramifications for a brand.
Somewhere out there, far into the great beyond, lies the outer bounds of human stupidity. With time, effort, and patience, we may soon reach it.
