That BK Ad

Rarely has a newspaper cartoon captured my exact thoughts as perfectly as this one did last week:

Thank you “Pearls Before Swine” for being a beacon of clarity.

This series of Burger King commercials, (you know the ones, unless you’ve been watching nothing but Netflix lately) has been driving me buggy since their onset a few years ago.

I’m going to dip into the long-neglected training from my Radio/TV/Film major college days and discuss this commercial in detail, from what they’re trying to do to why it irritates me and so many others.

One of the main things I learned was that every single thing you see in a commercial is put there to serve a purpose. Nothing is there by accident, especially in big national spots like these.

Every actor, setting, prop, costume, and graphic is there for a reason, usually as an unspoken message or reinforcement aimed at the demographic they’re trying to reach.

(Stupid local ads for car dealerships, lawyers, home improvement, and the like are a category unto themselves, where often the ad creators are just doing what the egocentric business owner tells them to. "Seriously, my customers love it when I yell car prices at them!")

If you ARE a Netflix devotee and have been fortunate enough to miss them, there’s a series of BK commercials wherein they do “updates” of their old 70s jingle, using someone who can’t sing.

If you’re anywhere close to my age, you remember the original jingle:

“Hold the pickle hold the lettuce,

Special orders don’t upset us.

All we ask is that you let us

Serve it your way.

Have it YOUR way,

Have it your Way, at Burger KING.”

At first, I was happy about the new ad series because it meant the end of their creepy “King-face mask” character that looks like a picture of Charlemagne from an old history textbook.

But now, their more recent ads are a travesty to anyone who takes Weird Al’s work seriously. There’s an art to creating an effective parody, or in this case, jingle refurbishment. You have to make it as close to the original as possible, optimally, using the same rhyming sounds and number of syllables per line as found in the original.

The new jingles sound like they are written by AI. They’re basically reciting menu items with descriptions from internal marketing memos, forced into the rhythm of the original jingle. The rhymes are elementary and they frequently jam far too many syllables into a line not designed to handle them. Or not enough.

One of them that’s running now is for the BK Melt. They stretch the word “melt” over five different notes, where five different words should be if you’re doing it right.

Instead of “Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce…” the lyric is “BK me-eh-eh-eh-elt…”

Deadpool would call it “lazy writing” and I agree. Maybe Mariah Carey can pull that off but not this guy. Which brings me to the next point.

For the voice, they use that of a non-threatening Black guy. Think “Jake from State Farm,” who’s basically Ned Flanders without the verbal flourishes. “Jake” started as a schlubby white guy before State Farm decided to make him a central character and they needed him to look cool bouncing around with Patrick Mahomes.

I presume they’re aiming for a lower to middle-class audience, with the identifiably Black voice, but not so Black as to scare off the white folks… looking for a sort of “everyman.” I mean, BK isn't going after Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse patrons, are they? And whoever this guy is, he can’t carry a tune. He kind of talk-sings like young children often do when they think they’re singing but really aren’t. Most of us can’t sing, so maybe they’re trying to seem relatable.

The original jingle used correct pronunciation. This one always elides the “your way” into “have it yer way.” This is another “everyman” touch, reaching out to people who don’t have time for fancy cooking or diction, and just want to be face-deep in a Whopper before they even pull out of the drive-thru.

And the last of the verbal tricks is that final “YOU RULE,” when the jingle is done, which is nothing but a transparent attempt to flatter the audience. “Yes, I rule. I am the King of the Value Menu! Bow before your Liege!”

The music tries to update the original tune with more electronica, but mostly drums. The drum sounds bounce around all over the place, making 30 seconds worth of impotent racket, like a drum fill that lasts for the entire jingle. And I say “impotent” because the drums sound like someone playing on shoe boxes, or just tapping an open mic. “Bup bup bup bup bup… mic check…” Maybe it’s a generational thing but to me, drums are supposed to thunder, not sound like Morse Code.

They also add some common tricks you’ll find elsewhere like stretching out the BEE sound in BK. It’s the “cheese” effect of picture-taking. When someone is holding a long E sound, it subconsciously evokes a smile. Applebee’s does this in their ads too.

And the same goes for extending the “ssssss” on the line where they rhyme "Shroom and Swiss" with “hunger blisssss.” The extended S also evokes a smile, like the long E. They must really want us to think their place is one happy kingdom.

If they’re that tired of coming up with new lyrics and rhymes, maybe they should just put this one to bed and try something else, maybe something original. Sure, they already owned the rights to the “Hold the Pickle" melody, so it was the cheap option. Maybe they can sponsor a nationwide search for a new jingle. They can make it for amateurs only so then when they find a good one, it’ll be that much easier to screw the artist on the copyright revenue.

“You want your jingle on national TV? Sign the papers.”

Then they can go back to milking that “everyman” vibe for all it’s worth. And maybe we can watch BK ads again without wanting to jam pencils into our ears.