"One such campaign, 'Whopper Sacrifice' – in which Facebook users were rewarded a free Whopper for deleting ten friends from their account, has been the most precise incidence of 'pop nihilism' to date. The underlying premise of the campaign was that the majority of one’s relationships are expendable, the Whopper serving as a material excuse to manifest this belief. The Whopper’s presence in the campaign was purely symbolic. The true appeal of the sacrifice was not the faux-nourishment of a hamburger, but for participants to relish in the misanthropic destruction of the social contract.
These campaigns are intentionally polemic – eliciting disgust in many, while others feel compelled to come to their defense. CP+B have torn a page right out of Ballyhoo in the sense that they aren’t selling hamburgers, they are selling the spectacle of advertising’s demise. Agencies who take this route and profit from its fleeting popularity will go down in history as advertising’s robber barons, those who cashed in on the medium’s social capital before it went bankrupt – signifying the moment advertising realized its own mortality and began to eat itself.
from Pop Nihilism: Advertising Eats Itself
