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As Burger King (and most everyone else) is well aware, ’tis the season… for hangovers.
With family gatherings, visiting with friends, various Christmas celebrations and New Year’s Eve parties, a whole lot of alcohol is going to be imbibed.
Which, in turn, means that there are going to be a lot of people waking up feeling less than ideal the day after those gatherings.
In an effort to help out the hungover (and drum up more business), Burger King in Brazil has announced that they will be using facial recognition technology to scan a potential customer’s face to determined the degree of hangover detected and the size of the recommended combo and discount offered to remedy it.
“It is a privilege to have partners like Burger King, who use boldness, innovation and irreverence as essential ingredients and are willing to put brand actions like this into practice. In this case, the use of facial recognition technology combined with humor will generate another fun connection with consumers,” said Icaro Doria, co-president and CCO of DM9, in a statement reported by Marketing Drive.
The program will run until January 2nd and it has already been tested out by writer Thomas Germain of Gizmodo.
“Waking up in a post-Christmas haze after one too many glasses of wine, I was the perfect test subject for this Orwellian fast-food gimmick,” he wrote.
“The discounts only work on delivery orders in Brazil, but the face-scanning happens in the company’s mobile app, as well as a dedicated website (the site only worked on mobile devices when I tried it). I gave the website permission to access my iPhone camera and posed for a photo.
“The Burger King software thought for a second, and then recommended the Double Whopper Jr. That’s only a one on the hangover scale — tell that to my headache — but I did earn a little discount for my privacy sacrifice: a coupon code for R$3.00, or about $0.62 in American dollars.”
Now if we can just get Burger King to roll the program out worldwide, and year-round, they might actually be on to something.