• The Wall Street Journal, Friday, February 8, 2008 12:15 PM

Ads that showed what happened at two Burger King outlets in Nevada when--in a hoax filmed by hidden cameras--customers were told the Whopper had been taken off the menu helped boost sales in the quarter that ended in December by a double-digit percentage. The "Whopper Freakout" ads started running Dec. 9.

The videotaped hoax was a twist on a market research technique called "deprivation research," in which marketers measure how loyal consumers are to a brand by taking it away from them. Experts say it's rare for the method to be used in actual consumer advertising.

Burger King and its ad firm--Crispin Porter + Bogusky--decided on an elaborate version of the deprivation experiment to prove Americans' deep allegiance to the famous burger. All this was captured on film by a documentary filmmaker. The final result was an eight-minute online video and a string of TV commercials that began running in December. The video has been played 3.3 million times on a special Web site and has had 357,367 views on YouTube.

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