The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2024
Burger King gets Google Maps users to rename a volcanic McDonald's Island 'Whopper Island'
Burger King found a real volcanic island named McDonald's and rallied #WhopperIsland reviews to rename it on Google Maps.
Burger King
What it had to solve
Burger King wanted to present its credentials as real food cooked over real fire and to argue its main competitor could not make the same claim. The argument needed to feel like fact, not advertising.
How it works
Burger King built its brand on real food cooked over real fire, and the sharpest way to say that was to take aim at the rival that does not flame-grill. The twist was that the proof already existed as geography: a real island in the Indian Ocean, home to an active volcano, is literally named McDonald's.
So the campaign made the island its centerpiece. A place with real fire cannot be a McDonald's, Burger King argued, and invited people to storm the island's location on Google Maps, posting reviews tagged #WhopperIsland to change the name on the map. Everyone who took part won a Whopper.
The result was an ad that the audience performed: the hashtag reviews were at once the message, the participation and the mechanism that could rename the place people would look up afterward. The D&AD awards archive records the campaign; the page carries no figures for reviews or a successful rename.
Why it lands
- The island makes the claim literal: a place with an active volcano really cannot be a McDonald's, so the argument starts as geography rather than copy.
- Google Maps is where the proof lives — reviews are the crowd's votes and the rename is a visible outcome people can check.
- Offering a Whopper as the reward turns participation into a game and gives the hashtag a reason to spread.
- Provoking an island named for the rival, not the rival's stores, keeps the attack playful and hard to answer seriously.
What it did
The brand claim was played out inside Google Maps itself: each review with the hashtag was both the argument and the act of renaming, with a Whopper as the stake. The D&AD awards archive keeps the campaign; the page records no review or reach figures.
What you can take
Point at proof your audience can act on: an island really named for the rival turned a comparison into a public act, because people could change the evidence rather than just agree with it.
Since then
The campaign's form — a real place, a crowd action, the map as medium — made the ad itself the artifact people check afterward. Whether the map name ever changed is not recorded on the D&AD page; what the archive preserves is the mechanism: give an audience a proof they can act on, and the acting becomes the advertising.
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