Classifieds

Whataburger’s Ad Flies High in the Great Wing Debate

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A gadfly has the floor at his local city council meeting, and he’s brought along visual aids to make his point. But his passionate argument has nothing to do with road repairs, zoning permits or other matters often discussed at such gatherings.

This man has fried food on the brain, specifically a new product from fast-growing chain Whataburger and how that crispy bone-free snack is identified.

“I know what a real wing is,” the man shouts as he points to the brand’s glamour shot of its saucy WhataWings. “That is not a wing!”

And so it begins, with Texas-based Whataburger wading into one of the fiercest yet silliest culinary debates in America—should a bone-free piece of chicken be allowed to call itself a wing? And what’s in a name, anyway?

To be clear, no one involved in the campaign from longtime agency of record McGarrah Jessee claims that the kerfuffle over messy finger food is in league with tax rates, outdated infrastructure or any other weighty community issue.

And yet the brand picked a well-known civic-minded setting, infused with some intentionally over-the-top histrionics, to launch its first boneless wing. The campaign experiments with humor as a departure from Whataburger’s usual marketing approach, with the product intro well-timed to the key Super Bowl party season.

“Wing culture has a lot of debates—ranch versus blue cheese, drum versus flat, wet versus dry—but no debate is more hotly contested than bone-in versus boneless,” AJ Hickcox, strategy director at McGarrah Jessee, known as McJ, told Adweek. “Ask any of your friends, do a quick Google search, scroll through X, take a plunge into the depths of Reddit, if you dare, and you’re going to find a lot of people have a lot of strong opinions on the boneless wing.”

There was even a nascent class-action lawsuit last year against Buffalo Wild Wings when an Illinois resident tried to claim false and deceptive advertising about its boneless wings, which Hickcox said proves that some people are serious about their semantics.

Given the landscape, Whataburger wanted to “get ahead of the criticism before the boneless wing naysayers out there even have the chance to voice their unrest,” Hickcox said.

Flightless bird

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