I was reading an article today on the FastCompany.com about a new Facebook application that Burger King had had developed by ad factory Crispin Porter + Bogusky. The Whopper Sacrifice application asks you to de-friend 10 of your Facebook buddies in exchange for a free whopper. Whether or not the application will take off is yet to be seen, but regardless of the success, or lack thereof, that this new app. will have, it’s very interesting to see Burger King making such a strong move into the world of Facebook as a means to reach its target customer base.

The group Burger King is targeting, the tweens through twenty-somethings that make up the bulk of Facebook’s user base, are pounded with ads more so than any generations past. The constant attachment to the internet comes with a constant supply of advertisements, for everything you could imagine, delivered from all angles. Predictably, these savy-surfers have become very good at simply ignoring the ads and surfing away through their games or chat or whatever content they may be enjoying. Ads aren’t considered the bad guy, but your run of the mill, cookie cutter advertisements simply won’t cut it with these folks.

S0 how does one get their ads noticed among a sea of people who’ve trained themselves to turn a blind eye? Easy. Well, easily said at least. You turn your ad into the very content that these people are on the internet to enjoy in the first place. While viral campaigns and the like are not new by any means in online advertising, gigantic companies like Burger King tend to be slow to react to the more cutting edge ways or reaching their audience. This is one reason it’s great to see BK taking such an active interest in spicing up their internet campaigns.

Another recent foray into the world of blending the line between ad and content is Burger King’s partnership with Seth McFarlane of Family Guy fame. “Seth McFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy” is a series of animated shorts done by McFarlane’s company, Fuzzy Door Productions, and sponsored by Burger King. Available on YouTube, the intro to each episode has the King, Burger King’s mascot, on the run from some pop-culture danger, such as the Hovito warriors from Raiders of the Lost Ark. By sponsoring these videos, Burger King has essentially produced an advertisement, but in such a way that instead of being a burden, viewers are more than happy to watch it.

That willing involvement is the key to successful campaigns on the net. People are more than happy to go to YouTube and watch the opening sequence with the King and then the short, and quite funny animation that follows. Likewise, the tongue in cheek fun of telling your friend you sold them off for a free hamburger will make Burger King’s new Facebook campaign enjoyable enough for people not to mind the fact that they’re being fed an advertisement.

Burger King has done a very good job at using new media to reach out to its target audiences, and the way that they’re going about it tells me that someone in the marketing department at BK knows what the score is when it comes to reaching out to the types of users that sites like YouTube and Facebook attract.