Burger King had a surprising ad for Superbowl which was accused of being “advertising for advertising people”. It involved Andy Warhol. Yes, the real Andy Warhol, eating a Whopper. Via AdAge:
In the future, maybe everyone will eat a Whopper for 15 minutes. Or at least 45 seconds.
“I still remember the first time I watched the complete length of the film of Andy Warhol eating a Burger King Whopper, and my head exploded,” says Fernando Machado, Burger King’s global chief marketing officer. “I was like, ‘Is that really Andy Warhol; why is he eating that? What’s happening there?'”
A few years later, an advertising dream of Machado’s has come true. Burger King, with the help of agency David Miami, got the rights to use footage of Warhol from “Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger,” directed by JØrgen Leth, in its Super Bowl spot. The full scene originally appeared in Leth’s 1982 film “66 Scenes from America.”
“One of the things that was unique about the negotiation was that we didn’t want to change or touch the film in any way that would take away from its original intent,” says Marcelo Pascoa, Burger King’s global head of brand marketing. “We knew that the best thing we could do would be to keep the film as intact as we could.”