Burger King’s Whopper ad trigger for Google Home has been disabled by Google. For a short period of time today a new Burger King Whopper ad that debuted on TV would trigger the Google Home to advertise the Whopper when the person in the commercial dressed as a Burger King employee asked Google at the end of the commercial what the Whopper burger was. It didn’t take long for Google to patch in a fix that would no longer allow this function to operate as it would understandably be annoying or upsetting some customers.
The forced burger advertisement that was being pushed through Google Home units reportedly grabbed its answer from Wikipedia, which Burger King themselves are suspected to have edited so that the speaker would kick back a response that sounded a lot like what Burger King would tell their customers if the same question was asked to them directly. That being said the Wikipedia entry can now only be edited by an admin likely due to the changes that were being made by just about everyone following the ad. Google’s swift action to disable the commercial’s ability to trigger Google Home shows that they no doubt believed the ad to be invasive and mirrors their actions to do something similar when they were pushing an advertisement for the live-action remake of The Beauty And The Beast, the only difference here is that the forced advertisement wasn’t coming from Google themselves as an ad that was programmed by them for the product.
Although it isn’t mentioned how Google disabled this functionality on Google Home it’s likely that the commercial is now registered as an unwanted trigger for the speaker so that it can’t actually serve up a flame-grilled response like it did when the ad first started airing earlier this morning. While Burger King’s new commercial was probably doing little harm and likely more of an annoyance than anything else to those that received an unwanted description of Burger King’s most iconic burger, it’s now potentially opened up the possibility for other brands to advertise in the same way, though Google will likely disable any of those as well should they come up.