What Was the Whopper Detour?
In December 2018, Burger King ran a nine-day stunt called the Whopper Detour: stand within 600 feet of a McDonald’s, open the BK app, and you could order a Whopper for one cent. The app then navigated you to the nearest Burger King to pick it up. It drove 1.5 million downloads and swept the 2019 Cannes Lions.
Picture this. It is December 2018 and Burger King’s own Twitter account posts something strange: “brb going to McDonald’s.” Fans are confused. Had BK lost its mind? Nope. It was the opening move of one of the wildest marketing stunts fast food has ever seen.
Here is the thing. Burger King had just rebuilt its mobile app with order-ahead, and nobody cared. So the brand and agency FCB New York did the opposite of obvious. They sent their customers to the competition. On purpose.
How Did the Whopper Detour Work?
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The Whopper Detour used phone GPS to geofence nearly 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants across America. If you walked within 600 feet of one with the Burger King app installed, the app unlocked a coupon for a Whopper for one cent.
Walk up to a McDonald’s. The app would detect you were inside one of the geofenced zones and pop up the offer: a Whopper for $0.01. Place the order, then follow the app’s directions away from McDonald’s to the nearest participating Burger King to collect your burger. The “detour” was literal.
A few rules kept it sane. The deal ran only from December 4 to December 12, 2018. Each registered app user could redeem it just once. Pickup happened at participating U.S. Burger King locations, not at McDonald’s. BK even released a video showing baffled McDonald’s staffers being asked for the one-cent Whopper they had never heard of.
Why Did Burger King Send You to McDonald’s?
It was not really about giving away cheap burgers. Burger King was late to mobile ordering, and its relaunched order-ahead app needed a jolt. McDonald’s outnumbered BK restaurants roughly two-to-one in the U.S., so FCB New York turned that around: the rival’s bigger footprint became 14,000 virtual promotional beacons for Burger King.
BK’s global CMO at the time, Fernando Machado, explained it with a brutal thought experiment. Option A: download the app, get a free Whopper. Option B: download the app, drive to a McDonald’s, order from there, pay one cent, drive back to Burger King. Option A was what every brand did, and nobody cared. Option B was ridiculous, and it hit the jackpot. “That’s the power of an idea,” Machado said. “The power to bend logic.”
The troll factor did not hurt either. Burger King has a long history of cheeky jabs at McDonald’s, and geofencing the enemy’s restaurants was the ultimate challenger-brand flex. Even the mobile billboard trucks parked near McDonald’s were part of the show.
Just How Big Were the Whopper Detour Results?
Honestly? Enormous. The kind of numbers marketing professors still put on slides.
1.5 million app downloads during the nine-day promotion, with more than a million in the first 24 hours alone. The BK app shot to #1 overall in Apple’s App Store, up from ninth place in the food and drink category, and also topped Google Play. Over 500,000 people actually redeemed the one-cent Whopper, about 40 times BK’s previous record for a digital coupon promotion.
The buzz numbers are just as wild: 3.5 billion impressions, an 818% jump in Twitter mentions, and an estimated $40 million in earned media, all free. Mobile sales through the app tripled, Burger King logged its highest store foot traffic in over four years, and the campaign delivered an estimated 37:1 return on investment. A few months later, total app downloads were up 4.5 million. That is a lot of mileage out of a penny burger.
What Awards Did the Whopper Detour Win?
At Cannes Lions 2019, the campaign won the Grand Prix in the Direct Lions and then bagged a second Grand Prix in the Mobile Lions, plus two golds in Direct and four golds in Media. Juror Robin Fitzgerald called it “a coupon, you can’t get more direct than that.” Machado’s own summary: it was “the most indirect idea to win the Direct Grand Prix in Cannes ever.”
It kept winning after Cannes, too. The Whopper Detour took Grand Prix of the Year for Product & Service at AD STARS 2019 (along with that festival’s Direct and Mobile Grand Prix), and in 2020 it won the U.S. Grand Effie, the top prize for marketing effectiveness. For a nine-day coupon, that is a trophy cabinet most campaigns can only dream about.
Can You Still Get a Whopper for 1 Cent?
No. The promotion ended on December 12, 2018, it was limited to one redemption per registered app user, and there is no secret code to revive it.
But the spirit lives on. Burger King’s app still runs exclusive deals and order-ahead offers, and the chain never really stopped trolling McDonald’s. The Whopper Detour remains the high-water mark: proof that the weirdest idea in the room can beat the biggest budget in the room.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
What was the Whopper Detour?
The Whopper Detour was Burger King’s December 2018 marketing stunt: stand within 600 feet of a McDonald’s with the BK app, unlock a Whopper for one cent, then get redirected to the nearest Burger King to pick it up. It ran December 4 to 12, 2018.
How did you get the 1-cent Whopper from Burger King?
You downloaded the relaunched BK app, walked within 600 feet of a McDonald’s (Burger King geofenced nearly 14,000 of them), unlocked the penny-Whopper coupon, placed the order, and followed the app’s directions to the nearest participating Burger King. One redemption per user.
How many people downloaded the Burger King app because of the Whopper Detour?
About 1.5 million downloads during the nine-day campaign, with more than a million in the first 24 hours. The app hit #1 in Apple’s App Store, and total downloads were up 4.5 million a few months later.
Is the Whopper Detour still available?
No. The promotion ended on December 12, 2018, and was limited to one Whopper per registered app user. The Burger King app still offers exclusive deals, but the one-cent Whopper is retired.
Prices last verified: October 23, 2026. Burger King’s official site is the source of truth for current menu prices: bk.com
