The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2024
Burger King Brazil 'buys' votes with fries to get citizens to the polls
With abstention high in Brazil's municipal elections, Burger King 'bought' votes with fries — anyone showing a voting receipt got free food.
Burger King
What it had to solve
Brazil suffers high voter abstention, and BK — known for 'Have It Your Way' — believed that when people choose their own path, the country's future gets better. The campaign needed to make voting feel personally worth doing.
How it works
Burger King's campaign in Brazil set out to tackle a big problem: high voter abstention. The brand, known for 'Have It Your Way', believed that when people choose their own path, the country's future gets better — so it wanted more citizens to care about voting.
Rather than run a civic lecture, BK said the forbidden thing out loud. Days before the municipal elections it launched an offer to buy people's votes: any customer who showed their voting receipt got french fries or onion rings.
The joke only worked because vote-buying is real and criminal in Brazil. By repointing the phrase at participation — paying people for showing up, not for supporting a candidate — the campaign turned the worst crime against a democratic election into its strongest ally. The work is preserved in the D&AD Awards archive under Commerce.
Why it lands
- Vote-buying is Brazil's election crime, so saying 'we buy your vote' out loud created a tension no ordinary civic advertisement could match.
- The deal rewarded participation itself — showing a receipt — not any candidate, so the provocation stayed on the side of democracy.
- The offer was dead simple to understand and act on: vote, show the receipt, eat.
- The slogan echoed BK's 'Have It Your Way' promise that choosing your own path is how the country improves.
What it did
The offer gave every voter a concrete reason to cast a ballot, turning the phrase that undermines elections into the incentive for taking part. The work is preserved in the D&AD Awards archive under Commerce.
What you can take
Name the thing no one is allowed to say. Declaring 'we buy your vote' — the election crime itself — and repointing it at participation turned the taboo into the campaign's most persuasive idea.
Since then
The campaign ran around Brazil's municipal elections and is preserved in the D&AD Awards archive, where Burger King is credited as the brand. Its lasting idea is the inversion itself: an election crime turned into the campaign's own headline, showing that the most forbidden phrase can become the most persuasive when it is repointed at civic participation.
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