Burger King once had a brilliant idea for an ad campaign – “Where’s Herb?” TV commercials ran for weeks touting the catch phrase, telling viewers that if they managed to spot Herb, they would win a cool $5000. There was just one problem: they didn’t tell anyone what Herb looked like. For weeks, fast food aficionados had to harass each other in restaurants, asking “Are you Herb? No? Are you Herb? How about you?” It was eventually revealed during the Superbowl that Herb was a complete dork in tight clothes who had never tried a Whopper before.
By that point, most of the interest had departed. People didn’t care about Herb anymore, or his obnoxious suit, or the fact that it was kind of creepy for a middle-aged white guy to be hanging out in Burger King all the time but not actually buying the food. Pretty much everyone was also sick of the billboards and commercials, which just wouldn’t let up. The ad campaign cost the corporation $40 million in the end, and probably drove off more customers than it managed to bring in. Herb’s career was not completely over, though; he would go on to become a guest timekeeper for Wrestlemania 2.
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