2020/2021 Winners & Shortlists

Write a short summary of what happens in the digital or ambient execution or campaign.

First, we examined the social chatter regarding Burger King’s whopper. A key observation emerged: both the words burger & Whopper have several written variations in Arabic, since the language lacked the sounds “G” as in Burger and “P” as in whopper. This difference in writing is a source of ongoing online debate among the language speakers. So, to launch our enhanced whopper, we decided to high jack and fuel this existing linguistic debate. To do so, we posted some lousy tweets and lighthearted videos where the voice-over and our actors were purposely spelling burger like “Burjer” or “Burker”. This approach of pronouncing burger in different variations, led many of our fans to jump in and suggest how to spell the word correctly. Which enabled us to indirectly promote our new whopper by talking about a much wider linguistic issue.

Cultural / Context information for the jury

In Saudi Arabia, global brands transliterate their names. The Problem is, “G” as in Burger - among other sounds - doesn’t exist in Arabic; which generates all types of mispronunciations. Every brand and every individual pronounce “Burger” differently according to how they see fit. This sound problem extends to other letters of the English alphabet like “V” and “P” where both lack the exact sound in Arabic. To substitute for this linguistic obstacle, some languages that have adopted the Arabic script tend to create a variation for the same script to cover all sounds in their languages. However, this is not the case in Arabic as the organizations responsible for developing, preserving and regulating the language are strictly against any change that risks the so called “purity of the Arabic language”. Which leaves brands and individuals alike with the dilemma of interpreting how absent sounds should be written in Arabic.