Whoppers aren't just for kings

If there is one word to sum up Burger King’s ‘Bundles of Joy’ campaign then perhaps it’s ‘nourishing'. Not only did the ad flip the status quo with its raw depiction of mothers biting into a Whopper after giving birth, it helped put the legendary brand back on the fast food map.

"The idea came from a very clear brief to drive delivery awareness. We had been doing delivery for a very long time but we didn't have the levels of awareness that our competition had," Burger King's CMO Katie Evans explains, speaking at Advertising Week Europe 2025.

Created by BBH during a period of sliding sales for Burger King, as well as a decline across the quick service restaurant (QSR) sector, it garnered immediate attention for its arresting challenge to traditional stereotypes of women and motherhood.

Following ‘Foodfillment’ and ‘Bundles of Joy’, Burger King’s parent company has gone on to successfully beat its fourth-quarter sales and profit estimates for 2024, helped by its focus on the value of the Whopper.

Evans explains that when she took up her role in 2018, she was asked to “take the keys to this iconic brand with over 90 per cent brand awareness and start to bring it into cultural awareness again”.

Celebrating Burger King’s recent work, she tells the story of re-enthroning the Whopper, and offers up suggestions for challenger brands in similar circumstances.

Why ideas should be uncomfortable

Evans highlights that some of her proudest moments have been when Burger King has been at its most irreverent – for example ahead of the 2019 election when the brand came out with an ad on the side of a bus outside the houses of parliament which read: ‘Another Whopper on the side of the bus. Must be an election’ with a burger plastered on the poster. A play on the fact that 'whopper' is also another word for a lie and a timely opportunity to show off Burger King’s hero product and playful ethos.

She adds that the idea, which garnered huge coverage across the world, was created in a spur- of-the-moment WhatsApp conversation with BBH and turned around in 24 hours.

And ‘Foodfillment’ was created with a similarly brave spirit. “If we were going to talk about delivery, we wanted to do it in a way that meant something, was brave, and cut through,” Evans explains.

She adds that although the idea (centred around the intense hunger many women feel post labour) was  presented by BBH pre-pandemic, but when it came up again last year the brand felt the timing was right as delivery had boomed: “The team represented it in the context of delivery and suddenly we though ‘Oh wow, how can we do this?’” 

Evans explains that they worked hard to ensure  the imagery was removed from the idyllic “glowing, nurturing and loving” view of women after labour. “You might be all of those things, but you’re also bloody starving,” she emphasises.

The team was aware that the idea would generate conversation. “We often say that a brief or an idea isn’t doing its job if it doesn’t make us feel a bit uncomfortable,” Evans says.

If creative bravery was at the core of the idea, the real test was how much conversation the campaign generated.

As part of the campaign, Burger King collaborated with Mumsnet to carry out a survey of more than 2,000 mums, with over a third saying that they would have appreciated a burger and fries as their first meal after delivering a baby.

But despite social media playing a central role in the work from the get-go, Evans  did not expect it to provoke quite as much LinkedIn furore as it did.

“There were lots of strong opinions from men on what women should eat. It was very visible and public on LinkedIn, and in some cases it came from the right place – but try telling a woman after 15 hours of labour that the right thing to do is have a green juice and wait for the response. That response started to play out in front of us,” Evans explains.

Garnering a total of over 100 pieces of earned media from The Daily Mail to the New York Post only spurred on the conversation on both sides of the debate.

Although it was at times tempting to hover by their keyboards and come up with a response, the team was  adamant that the conversation had to happen organically. “The conversation was happening and it’s not our right to intervene and reinforce where we were coming from because that was pretty clear, and to weigh in with our perspective at that point would have created a problem”.

'Trust your gut'

Asked what advice she would give to other marketers, Evans says, “Trust your gut… lean into your strengths and know what makes you different”.

“In a category where there’s a lot of media spent on product shots and a lot of food porn there is a certain degree of brand apathy,” she adds. The aim, she emphasises, is to generate a feeling to drive consideration.

Even though it had 98 per cent brand awareness, the task at hand was to put the Whopper front and centre in consumers’ minds.

“To a certain extent, we have to trust our guts in a lot of the work we do. There’s no testing that’s going to give me a number and say you should do this. I don’t think any testing would have predicted this would generate the level of feeling and conversation it did,” adds Evans, “The final thing is that we stuck to our guns. We made sure everything we were doing was rooted in insight and rooted in the real."