Okay, Google, this could get annoying.
A new ad from Burger King sets out to trigger Google Home and Android devices with the company’s signature prompt.
“Okay Google, what is the Whopper burger?” a fast food employee asks in the 15-second spot.
For anyone with certain Google-powered gadgets in the vicinity of their television, that sentence will cue a digital assistant to spit back the text of the Wikipedia entry for the menu item.
The campaign is one of the first to harness the power of the voice activation of smart home devices, and it was made without Google’s involvement.
The commercial has also sparked a standoff on Wikipedia. In preparation for the campaign’s rollout, the fast food chain’s marketing team appears to have tried to change the site’s description of its signature burger to include more appealing advertising copy.
Wikipedia’s editors, who are committed to ensuring the site isn’t co-opted for advertising purposes, immediately reverted the entry to the more straightforward definition that existed before.
“The above reads as obvious ad-copy,” a note in the page’s edit discussions section reads in reference to Burger King’s proposed changes. “I think the opening of the article reads just fine as is.”
The idea that anyone can edit the text of a web page that will then be piped into thousands of homes also raises some interesting possibilities.
While the ad is a clever way to get the attention of electronics lovers, it’s easy to see how it could get irritating very quickly. Google already faced user backlash when it started broadcasting ads for Beauty and the Beast through Google Home devices last month.
