Food Theory: Did Burger King JUST Break The Law?

hey uh i'm allowed to customize my whopper right great so i'll get a whopper no tomato no onion and no predatory marketing practices [Music] hello internet welcome to food theory where today we're taking a big old bite out of some flame broiled controversy in the fast food and streaming communities as i'm sure most of you are aware twitch is a live streaming platform that allows streamers to interact directly with their audiences in roughly real time the audience types comments into the chat and the live streamer responds on camera and there are lots of ways for those interactions to happen with basic chat messages sending money to the streamer via donation of twitch bits and paying to subscribe to the channel for a series of months being the three most common but there are some other neat tools out there that might not be as well known one of those is a chat feature called text to speech or tts where for a small donation you can pay to have a computerized voice read your message aloud to the stream for everyone including the streamer to hear now as a denizen on the internet you probably know how well opening up a free platform to have a random comment heard is gonna go but i'm gonna tell you anyway tts donations sometimes they're pretty much what you would expect them to be i'm a creep that want to see woman in bra hey that's uh yeah stop sorry about that and sometimes just sometimes text-to-speech donations are just downright wholesome midi oh you are an absolute ray of sunshine i love this stream have the coffee on me thank you so much midi but regardless of the motivation at the end of the day tts donations are intended and typically used as a way for fans to give back to their favorite creators a tool to help ensure that their comment doesn't just get lost in the chat scroll and that my friends is where today's food theory story begins you see this past summer burger king in conjunction with the ad agency david madrid realized tts donations could be used to advertise bk's menu and so they created a campaign called the king of stream in it they went around to dozens of different twitch streams and paid the minimum donation an amount set by each individual streamer but typically in the range of three to five dollars to have their comments read via text to speech at which point the entire audience and the streamers themselves were made aware of all the great deals that burger king's menu has to offer hi there hey i just donated five dollars to tell you that you can spend five dollars and get a whopper what is going on in the end the king of stream campaign reached a large audience on a shoestring budget and was seen as a success how do we know that because burger king's ad agency took the footage of all these interactions and made a best of compilation proudly explaining what they did and you know did that without licensing anyone's names likenesses voices hence all the blurring and distortion that you see they never use the word twitch anywhere in the ad opting instead for the more general term live streaming platform and the blatant use of twitch's purple and white style heck they even replaced the game footage from the original streams with shutterstock footage of generic video games since they didn't want to license that stuff either gotta love all those racing games with speed racing speed racing and faster and faster and faster and faster on all the road signs you pass i have donated five bucks so i can say that's on the burger king app you can get a whopper are you gonna sponsor me or not that exchange right there says it all are you gonna sponsor me or what to which burger king replies we just gave you five bucks see in the wake of this campaign two camps have emerged team marketing who believes that there's nothing wrong with how burger king did this like it's a 200 iq play brand should have been doing this a long time ago hats off to burger king i'm gonna go buy a whopper after this and team streamer who believes that the campaign was a scummy way for a billion dollar corporation to hawk their chicken nuggets for a fraction of what it should have really cost them the fact that burger king has figured out how to do sponsorships for pocket change by abusing a system meant for fan interaction with no prior consent from the streamers has understandably pissed off pretty much every streamer on twitch and while it's certainly true that a lot of streamers were speaking out against the king of stream campaign where's mike madrev you owe me royalties for that you took up 30 seconds of my stream some went even further to question whether this move by burger king went beyond mere etiquette breach and went full on into illegal territory by violating federal trade commission or ftc guidelines i woke up this morning i had i had emails from bbc kotaku to name a few my statement is that like if this is legit it's an ftc violation and they they should not have been doing it because it puts us in a position where we are airing undisclosed ads so who's right and who's wrong here friends is this whole fiasco a complete nothing burger or is it totally a something burger did burger king indeed pull off a 200 iq move that'll have him laughing all the way to the bank or will team streamer ultimately get the last laugh possibly in a court of law and that dear theorists is what we'll be answering today now before we get into the hairy gray area of whether or not this was some form of legal promotion one thing that's undeniable here is that the king of stream campaign was a clear violation of terms of service one of team marketing's arguments in this whole debate has been that if streamers weren't happy with the messages burger king was reading off well they could always you know disable all text-to-speech donations except that sort of logic doesn't fly here burger king was knowingly or not misusing the tools available to them twitch's terms of service lists unsolicited advertising promotional materials or other solicitation material as prohibited behavior but perhaps even more importantly burger king appears to have violated the terms of service for the third-party live streaming software that actually handles the donations and provides the text-to-speech feature to begin with see twitch is just the platform it doesn't provide its users with those kinds of fancy bells and whistles in order to accept donations a twitch streamer has to utilize live streaming software such as stream labs which is distinct from twitch and comes with its own separate terms of service and it appears that the king of stream campaign violated streamlabs terms of service in a whole bunch of ways too quote from those using the site for commercial or promotional purposes is listed under prohibited conduct as is displaying an unauthorized commercial advertisement as is attempting to post messages or advertisements with a commercial purpose furthermore the terms of service specify commercial activities and or sales without prior written consent from streamlabs as prohibited content i mean it really doesn't get a whole lot more clear-cut than that from both twitch's perspective and from streamlabs perspective the burger king posts were in clear breach of tos always have been now of course violating the terms of service doesn't mean that bk broke the law sure from an ethics and pr standpoint not a good look but on the other hand so what not to go all nihilist pat on you but what's twitch or stream labs gonna do to punish him delete the account from the looks of things burger king may have already removed the king of stream u.s account themselves they got the footage they needed they got the word out about bk's apps and menu deals at this point they've already extracted everything they need out of the twitch community time to cash out basically they pulled a ninja so team streamer can take comfort in the moral victory if they like but the bigger issue and the one with a lot more ramifications is whether this ad campaign was illegal for anyone that touched it and that's not an easy one to answer because the king of stream basically introduced the world to an entirely new type of advertising like what do you call this type of ad to date only a couple of companies have tried anything like the king of stream campaign on twitch most notably cash app who managed to do it without taking twitch streamers off too much because a cash app actually creates twitch content and b they didn't just use the absolute minimum donation the way that burger king did i would say very different in my opinion from what cash app does usually gifting subs and streamers out there there is no message with gifted subs there's no automatic reading out of what cash app does by the way i've never seen cash app ever just gift one sub you're typically gifting i would say 10 20 25 subs at the bare minimum which is much more than a measly five dollar donation anyway since the practice is so new it'd be helpful to have a definition on hand do corporate text-to-speech donations qualify as sponsorships are they advertisements are they something else entirely how is this thing that bk created viewed in the eyes of the law now the term sponsorship implies a relationship between the two parties in question so i'm gonna go ahead and say that an unexpected text-to-speech donation from a corporate donor does not qualify as sponsorship contrary to what many of the streamers might feel out there see an important difference between an advertisement and a sponsorship is that an ad doesn't really imply any sort of endorsement on the part of the creator as a youtube partner for instance i have a lot of control about where ads appear in my videos but i have far less control when it comes to which advertisers choose to run those ads and in my experience the audience tends to get this you lovely viewers at home understand that just because an ad for the church of yelling at puppies happened to play on my channel before a video that doesn't mean i support or even have any sort of opinion about the church of yelling at puppies however if i were to announce that an episode had been sponsored by the church of yelling at puppies well then i'd have to believe i'd get a lot of rough feedback from the fans and i deserve it because i actively chose that sponsorship as opposed to the pre-roll ad where it was just kind of thrust upon me now watching the reactions that the bk donations got it's clear that the streamers were unaware of what was going on i just got a donation that was using the text of like an adverb i am so confident and because the streamer and burger king had no agreement or business relationship to speak of streamers are under absolutely no obligation to endorse burger king's products any streamer who receives a tts donation is free to do what twitch streamer rubber ninja did tell burger king to its face that he was gonna use the donation to buy an actual meal then take to social media and call the campaign quote scummy as heck and then double the donations that he got and donate them to the ronald mcdonald house that is some galaxy brain action going on right there fast food in the us ain't good it's not as good it's disappointing you know with all this fast food money i could go out and buy an actual meal surprise surprise rubber ninja's footage didn't make it into the burger king compilation for some reason no very clearly the king of stream donations are closest to a traditional ad as bloom adds puts it quote advertising implies that a payment has been made to place an ad with specific messaging and burger king explicitly does that with its tts messages and from that perspective things start to look very differently because now you're not comparing those five dollar donations to thousand dollar sponsorship deals that's comparing apples to very expensive oranges it seems more accurate to compare burger king's tts donation advertisements to mid-roll advertisements because let's face it they're both ads and they both play in the middle of the stream i mean sure streamers get to select when their mid-roll ads play as opposed to getting blindsided by an ad whenever the sponsor decides the time is right but given that twitch recently began experimenting with mid-roll ads that are platform controlled aka the streamers don't get to choose when they play the difference between tts donation ads and mid-roll ads is becoming foggy to say the least so toss a couple more similarities onto that list both types of ads interrupt streams at inconvenient times and streamers aren't happy about either of them and when looked at from that perspective the five dollar donations look much less egregious i can't speak to the current rates of twitch mid-roll ads but on youtube for ad revenue the amount that you earn per thousand views is a lucky to get over five dollars it's only something that happens for like the top top tier channels at some of the peak times a year especially when you're talking about gaming videos so depending on how many viewers each of these streamers had when the tts donations came in they may have made more from that donation or at the very least from that series of donations than they would have from a similar mid-roll ad running in the same place i mean don't get me wrong it's an involuntary mid-roll no one wanted it to be placed there but is it all that different from the new policies that twitch just put in place so is that it is burger king right to say just take the five dollars and be happy with it like they said in the ad because i don't know about you but something still feels wrong about that if i'm a streamer and i don't want mid-roll ads i just turn them off easy all my funding can be fan funding there are plenty of channels who don't want to accept advertising dollars and do that but with text-to-speech donations it's tricky sure i could turn those off too to prevent burger king from misusing them but the tool was intended to be used for community engagement not as an advertising platform what burger king did was insert a spam message into the middle of the stream and it's that breach of terms of service that i keep going back to here at its core the king of stream campaign misused community engagement tools to broadcast their message in the middle of an ongoing piece of content regardless of whether that came with a price tag it is literally hijacking the stream using tools meant for other purposes which you know is pretty similar to the definition of what's known as broadcast signal intrusion you see it doesn't happen too often but starting back in the 1970s and occurring even as recently as 2017 you have occasional incidents where tv radio or satellite signals get hijacked by people looking to pull a prank or send some sort of message in 1987 the playboy channel was hijacked with a religious message repent the kingdom of heaven is at hand in 1986 hbo's satellite feed was interrupted by a man calling himself captain midnight which funny enough is also the name of one of my favorite film analysis channels here on youtube shout outs to him anyway the hijacking was done by a guy who was frustrated by his declining satellite tv business at the hands of hbo but perhaps the most iconic signal intrusion example was the max headroom incident when a man wearing a rubber mask of a popular 80s character max headroom took over the signals of two television stations in chicago to ramble incoherently get himself spanked and recite coca-cola's catchphrase of the time catch the wave catch the wave coke in each of these cases simple broadcasting tools were misused to interrupt an ongoing piece of content with an unwanted message in a way that seems very similar to the king of stream so is this sort of practice illegal yes but not in the way that you'd expect we're not concerned about the ftc anymore we're instead focused on the fcc the federal communications commission because these sorts of attacks were so new at the time laws didn't really exist to punish him captain midnight after his hijacking of hbo was charged with the crime transmitting without a radio license because it was really the only thing they could get him for and even that really didn't apply because the transmitter he used had a license anyway it ultimately netted him a 5 000 fee and a year probation but it prompted the fcc to update its policies and create a new code that made such disruptions a felony does that then mean that the king of stream is an illegal felony no because once again just like those early hijackings we're dealing with a technology gap the new laws in place around broadcast interference are specifically around interfering with satellite feeds there's nothing from what i can find covering interruption of an internet-based streaming broadcast the tldr here was king of stream a bad look yes was it illegal no at least not until the laws catch up with the way that modern entertainment and advertising happens and considering the fact that the government's still trying to figure out how to log into their hotmail i think we have a couple years before they get around to twitch text-to-speech donations what is a twitch guys so it would seem then that the cavalry is not coming to save team streamer even if twitch and or stream labs manage to slap burger king on the wrist for terms of service violations there won't be any real repercussions for corporations who spam um excuse me advertise via text-to-speech donations at least not until the law can catch up with the times so what is a streamer to do how do you fight back without the law or technology to help well here's a theory streamers do have one very powerful tool available to them shame shame is how team stream wins the war think about it the twitch community has managed to keep spam from individuals and self-promotion to a dull roar up to this point how by self-enforcing the rule you don't use someone else's stream to promote your own it is literally in the don't column of official twitch etiquette and twitch users are typically quick to call out those who violate the etiquette so get this you can treat massive corporations promoting burgers the exact way you'd treat a 12 year old promoting his lit fortnight streams you don't engage you report it or you just shame them on social media until the behavior stops just because a person or company donates money to your channel does not mean that you're under any obligation to thank them engage with them or even be polite i know that last one is going to be tough for all you canadian streamers out there look if a company honestly believes that they're better off without a signed sponsorship agreement then streamers have every right to show them why they're wrong if a streamer believes that a text-to-speech donation breaks with etiquette they should say so and make noise about it heck it's kind of the reason i made this video in the first place because the legal battle may not be winnable for some time but the pr battle is winnable right now but hey that's just a theory a food theory bon appetit [Music] you

Channel: The Food Theorists

Views: 3,844,873

Rating: 4.9487162 out of 5

Keywords: burger king, burger king commercial, king of the stream, burger king hack, burger king twitch, twitch burger king, burger king foot lettuce, burger king mukbang, fast food mukbang, burger king methane, recipe, food theory, food theorists, matpat, game theory, game theorists, film theory, film theorists, eat the menu, rosanna pansino, binging with babish

Id: YPj8iYdej18

Length: 17min 22sec (1042 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/anonymouse239]

As a marketer, What BK and the agency did was terrible. I also feel like they could be illegal under CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing) law. Marketers can't just spam. It's illegal.

I think it's best to compare these ads to ones in text messages or emails. Not mid-roll adds, which the user consents to under the TOS.  CAN-SPAM is pretty broad as it covers "any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service'". I think the ads being a TOS violation helps this argument. They failed to allow an Opt-out. They broke CAN-SPAM.

Some links to read more about it.
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-can-spam-ht https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business

[u/LazyMote]

What bk did feels like someone gave 5 dollars to guitar player and told made them tell people to play violin.

[u/Nazrininator]

What game is on 2:35?

[u/Fireis117]

what is the music in the background of it in the outro i can hear it normally and i want to find out what is playing man i am still searching for it