There’s a clip going around of McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski eating a Big Arch burger. He takes a small, careful bite. Then he looks at the camera and calls the burger a “product.”
Not a burger. A product.
That one word became the story. People in the comments clocked it immediately. “First time he’s ever tried it,” someone wrote. Another person noticed it was the smallest first bite they’d ever seen from someone who was supposed to be selling the thing. The clip was meant to promote McDonald’s newest sandwich. Instead it became a case study in what happens when the gap between how a company talks internally and how it talks to customers accidentally goes public.
Meanwhile, Burger King’s U.S. and Canada president Tom Curtis had posted a video of himself eating a Whopper. He looked like a person who was actually hungry. He’d already given out his personal cell number a few weeks earlier. He was personally calling customers back. His wife had reportedly banned the calls from inside the house.
The internet, predictably, noticed the contrast.
What Burger King Was Already Doing Before the Internet Noticed
This is the part most coverage missed, and it matters a lot.
The Burger King Whopper bite video wasn’t a reaction to Kempczinski’s stumble. BK’s CMO Joel Yashinsky told Adweek the timing was “fortuitous,” because they had already shot the content weeks earlier, as part of a broader platform shift they had been building for months. The video existed before the McDonald’s moment ever went viral.
The cell phone number thing started February 17. Curtis posted his real number online and invited customers to text or call with feedback. By February 26 — nine days later — Burger King had already updated the Whopper bun based on what it heard. New bun. New squish-proof box for the sandwich. Real changes, made fast, because people actually called.
By the time the Kempczinski clip went viral and Burger King reposted Curtis’ Whopper video to TikTok with the caption “Thought we’d replay this,” it wasn’t reactive genius. It was operational credibility that happened to be camera-ready. That’s a different and more interesting story.
The company had received over 35,000 calls and texts. Curtis had personally responded to 2,000 of them. His quote about why it worked captures something worth paying attention to: “Every time you talk to a guest, you’re not just talking to one person. You’re talking to their family and their friends. When someone says, ‘You’re not going to believe who I talked to today,’ that becomes part of how you build the brand.”
He went to bed a pizza delivery guy. He woke up as president of Burger King. That kind of humility, whether it’s performed or genuine, is what people are picking up on right now.
Why “Product” Landed So Badly
The word itself isn’t the problem. Kempczinski probably says “product” in every leadership meeting. It’s a normal internal word for a food company. The problem is that he said it out loud, on camera, while eating a burger, talking directly to customers.
There’s a useful framework for understanding why that felt so off. When something sounds technically correct but feels wrong, it’s usually because the language is calibrated for the wrong audience. Kempczinski was in front of a camera talking to people who eat at McDonald’s and love McDonald’s. His brain defaulted to boardroom language. “Product” is what you say to an investor. It is not what you say to someone who eats a Big Mac every Friday.
The result was a kind of cognitive dissonance that people felt but couldn’t fully explain. So they explained it with memes. The comment sections started doing the analysis for him, and none of it was flattering.
This is how authenticity failures work now. They don’t get a correction. They get a clip, a TikTok, a side-by-side comparison with somebody else doing the same thing better. Newsweek ran the comparison and pulled in over 3 million Instagram views. The contrast did the work.
The Oscars Ad Was the Period at the End of the Sentence
In March, Burger King ran a 90-second ad during the Oscars. Curtis narrated it himself. The ad is unusual because it is one of the only major fast food ads in recent memory that openly acknowledges the brand lost the plot.
“There was a time Burger King used to be King. Somehow, somewhere, fast food just fell off. Us included. And that’s not good. So we started listening. I even gave my number out.”
He lists the complaints. Old restaurants. Slow service. Simple mistakes. TikTok reviews flash on the screen. He says they fired the King mascot — the creepy one — and replaced the king with the customer.
The ad was created with agency OKRP. Their EVP Matt McNulty described it as trying to document a “real, years-long story of co-creating the future of Burger King with guests.” Executive creative director Ben Pfutzenreuter said it had to feel “real, transparent, and human. Because it is.”That framing matters. This isn’t Burger King pretending to care. The infrastructure for actually caring — a president taking calls for four hours a day, feedback loops reaching franchise owners within 15 minutes of a complaint — had been running for years before anybody made an ad about it. That’s why the ad works. It has receipts.
The Domino’s Shadow Nobody Is Talking About
Curtis came from Domino’s. He was in senior leadership there in 2010 when the company did something almost identical — and became the textbook case for brand turnaround marketing.
Domino’s ran ads in 2009 that admitted their pizza was bad. The CEO said it on camera. The company shared the negative customer reviews. Sales went up 14.3 percent in Q1 2010, according to research by Millward Brown. The stock went from around $3 a share to over $400 in the decade that followed.
The parallel isn’t perfect. Domino’s was in a deeper hole than Burger King is right now, and Burger King’s recovery is still unfolding. But Curtis watched that campaign from the inside. He knows what happens when you build honesty into the product, not just the advertising.
That context makes the phone number less of a stunt and more of a philosophy. Curtis told BuzzFeed that he sees the calls as modeling behavior. When the president picks up the phone, franchisees start posting their own numbers inside restaurants. The behavior spreads.
What This Actually Tells Us About How Brands Win Right Now
The fast food burger wars in 2026 are a decent illustration of something broader.
People have gotten really good at detecting the gap between what a company performs and what it actually does. The tells are small. A careful bite. The wrong word. A response that reads like it was drafted in a legal review. None of it is technically dishonest, but all of it registers as off.
The brands that are winning aren’t necessarily doing something radical. They’re just doing the obvious thing for real instead of performing it.
Curtis drives through Burger King locations. He listens to calls about broken signs in Montana. His wife bans the work calls from inside the house. These details travel because they feel true in the way that most branded content doesn’t. You can’t fake the Montana sign story. You can’t manufacture a wife who won’t let you take calls in the living room.
McDonald’s, for its part, is still the most valuable fast food brand in the world by a significant margin — around $42.6 billion in brand value to Burger King’s $4.8 billion. Its same-store sales were growing at a faster clip than Burger King’s going into this moment. This story doesn’t end with Burger King dethroning anyone.
But in the specific war for attention and credibility happening on TikTok and in comment sections, Burger King walked into 2026 with better ammunition. Not because they were smarter. Because they were already doing the work.
The viral moment didn’t make them look good. They were already doing something that made them look good. The viral moment just showed it.
That’s the difference between a strategy and a lucky break. And it’s the difference most marketing departments will argue about for the next two years.
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