Burger King Serve Up a Premium Celebrity Ad

A celebrity in your ad is a great opportunity. Not every brand takes it. The weakest celebrity ads tend to be ones where anyone could be filling the star guest’s role. The strongest ones are the ones you can only make because you’ve got that specific person, like an ad which takes their public persona and plays with it to entertain viewers and get across the brand’s message.

Burger King’s “Not Made By Gordon” is that kind of ad. It uses its celebrity, sweary super-chef Gordon Ramsay, exceptionally well, but in the end the real star is the chain’s premium Wagyu burger. The concept of the ad is that the Wagyu is so good, Gordon wishes he made it, but he didn’t. In fact, he’s so envious he keeps pestering BK workers to let him help and infiltrates their kiosks to deliver the Wagyu meals to customers.

The ad couldn’t work with anyone other than Gordon Ramsay. There’s a basic “what??” response for audiences seeing a top chef advertising fast food, and the ad plays with that reaction. Not only is Ramsay in the ad, the whole point is that he’s not actually involved with the food. It subverts expectation in another way, too. Ramsay’s public persona is confrontational to say the least, but here he’s polite to the point of being meek when staff dismiss his pleas to help with the Wagyu.

So this is a great way to use a celebrity, and Burger King is taking full advantage with a multi-platform, multi-media campaign for its high-end burger built around the “Not Made By Gordon” concept. The ad – and the Gordon Ramsay connection – immediately drove press and public interest in a premium product, so agency BBH can chalk this up as a marketing success already. But how does it fare with ordinary viewers seeing it as an ad?

We tested it using our Test Your Ad Digital platform, designed to measure an ad’s performance in an online video environment. The average score for long-term brand-building effectiveness is 2.8-Stars, and “Not Made By Gordon” easily clears that bar with a very good 3.9-Star Rating, putting it into the top 15% of all digital ads. The ad also gets very strong, above-the-norm ratings on the shorter term metrics of Spike Rating and Brand Fluency.

Burger King have a great reputation for creative, award-winning marketing but sometimes their ideas don’t fully translate to a wider public. But the “Not Made By Gordon” ad does it all – a very cheeky, creative idea that’s also a genuinely popular bit of advertising.