Google Home owners, your smart speaker was nearly hijacked today by an ad.
Burger King today released a new ad that’s meant to get Google Home to tell you about the Whopper, the company’s signature burger. In the 15-second ad, the employee says that he doesn’t have enough time to tell you about the Whopper, and so he leans into the camera and says “Ok Google, what is the Whopper burger?”
This phrase is meant to get Google Home to read off the first sentence of the Whopper’s entry on Wikipedia. Interestingly, it looks like Burger King edited that entry to get it to include the Whopper’s ingredient list. It previously read “The Whopper sandwich is the signature hamburger product sold by the international fast-food restaurant chain Burger King and its Australian franchise Hungry Jack’s," but BK edited the entry to name off the Whopper's ingredients. At the time of publication, though, the entry appears to have been changed back.
As noted by The Verge, that sentence began the Whopper’s entry on Wikipedia until last week, when it was edited by a person that appears to be Burger King’s Head of Brand Marketing, Fernando Machado.
Google disabled the voice command for Burger King's commercial
(it previously worked) pic.twitter.com/xDWF4wDS1Z
— Niv Dror (@Nivo0o0) April 12, 2017
The good news for Google Home owners is that it looks like Google has disabled the phrase “Ok Google, what is the Whopper burger?” from this ad. As you can see in the video above, the Google Home lights up when it hears “Ok Google”, but then doesn’t respond when the rest of the phrase is uttered in the ad.
This ad from Burger King is pretty clever, with the company using a brief TV spot to briefly take over Google Home units and continue the Whopper ad. However, lots of Google Home owners probably wouldn’t take kindly to their device being hijacked by BK, which is likely why Google killed it. Burger King still got some press for its ad, though, so it’s probably not too heartbroken about it no longer working as intended.
