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Carl's Jr. begs Amazon to buy it on Twitter

Commentary: Is this supposed to be funny? Or is it serious? Or is it both? Or is it just advertising?
3 min read

People don't think about us so much since we stopped featuring sexy women eating our big, fat burgers sexily.

I know. But what are you going to do? Everything's so PC these days.

How about we give up?

We're marketing people. We never give up. 

No, give up the company and make money. How about we beg Amazon to buy us? I mean, we're almost as healthy as Whole Foods.

And that is how I imagine that Carl's Jr.'s more fertile minds came up with the marketing ideas that, on Monday, coursed all over Twitter like burger fat rolling into a teenage boy's ear.

It began at 3 a.m. Eastern on Monday, as the burger chain's Twitter account was adorned with, for example, this: "HEY @Amazon BUY US. Srsly. For real. Let's do this. Let's change the future of eating!!"

Srsly.

And then there was this: "OBVI our $5 All Star Meal Boxes & @Amazon boxes belong together. At midnight we'll prove it to you!"

OBVI.

If only it had stopped with one or two tweets. One might have put it down to good cheer. Or too much lemonade. 

But no. The whole of Columbus Day was filled with Carl's Jr. offering its ideas for a seamless partnership between itself and Amazon. 

Yes, there was more. A lot more:

A Carl's Jr. spokeswoman emailed me before I'd even woken up to tell me that the company was "serving Amazon a delicious offer they would be crazy to refuse."

Crazy.

Jeff Jenkins, Carl's Jr.'s chief marketing officer, was excitedly telling USA Today: "This is about generating a conversation around a partnership. The tweets are obviously a start to try and see where the dialogue goes … have a lot of fun with it, and see if they find the spirit of it as fun as we do."

Obvi.

Equally obvi, some might feel, Amazon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Srsly.

More Technically Incorrect

By later in the day, it seemed that Carl's Jr. was beginning to see that its tease was that of a wooer with a hairless chin.

"Our goal has always been to put a smile on our customers' faces, and we hope that's what we've done by celebrating the absurdity of our billion-dollar ideas that we had a ton of fun coming up with," Jenkins told me.

I'm always glad when people have fun, especially a ton of it. I fear, though, that too many of Carl's Jr.'s tweets weren't enjoyed by a ton of people.

Most enjoyed a number of retweets and likes so paltry that, if President Donald Trump had received so few, he would have blamed Twitter censorship. In a tweetstorm, of course.

Carl's Jr.'s Twitter account has known this pain before.

Last month, it tried to mock rival Wendy's. Here's what it replied to a customer who asked how Wendy's compared with Carl's Jr.

And here's what Wendy's legendarily sharp Twitter account offered in return.

That's not the sort of performance likely to impress Amazon's Jeff Bezos.

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