Burger King's 7.4% Traffic Surge: How Tom Curtis Turned Executive Authenticity Into a Marketing Weapon

When McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski posted a video of himself biting into the new Big Arch burger, it became the kind of viral moment marketing teams dread. The clip read as staged, the enthusiasm performative. Social media piled on. Instead of generating buzz for a new product, it generated mockery for a brand already fighting traffic declines.

Burger King's brand president Tom Curtis saw an opening.

What Curtis did next produced one of the more instructive marketing case studies in recent QSR history: a deliberate, phased campaign that leaned into the contrast with McDonald's, put a real executive on the line with real customers, and delivered a 7.4% year-over-year increase in restaurant visits. Not a vague "brand lift." Actual traffic.

The Setup: Retire the Mascot, Put Up a Human

The first move was symbolic. Burger King retired its long-running King mascot. In a category crowded with cartoon characters, food props, and AI-generated talking burgers, clearing the mascot out of frame was a statement: we're going to talk to you directly.

Curtis stepped into that void. His role as brand president made him a credible face for the brand, senior enough to carry authority but not so removed from operations that he'd seem like a PR plant. The campaign built in phases specifically to avoid the one-shot spectacle problem that afflicts most major QSR marketing pushes.

Phase one launched on February 17. Curtis shared his personal work phone number publicly and invited customers to reach out. This is the kind of move that sounds good in a pitch deck and terrifying in practice. What actually happened: more than 30,000 messages arrived.

Curtis personally responded to 2,000 of them.

That number matters more than the 30,000. Anyone can invite contact. Responding to 2,000 individual customer messages is a substantial commitment of executive time, and it's verifiable. Customers who got responses talked about it. Screenshots circulated. The authenticity held up under scrutiny because the authenticity was real.

The Oscars Moment: Scale Without Losing the Thread

Phase two ran on March 15 with a 90-second spot during the Academy Awards broadcast, reaching approximately 20 million viewers. At 90 seconds, the ad was longer than most brands are willing to pay for on prestige broadcast inventory. The length served a purpose: it gave Curtis room to be a person rather than a product spokesperson.

The creative team reportedly leaned hard into contrast with McDonald's. A video of Curtis biting into a Whopper, mayo visible on his face, circulated as part of the campaign. The deliberate messiness was the point. Where Kempczinski's video felt like it had been rehearsed and lit and approved by fifteen people, Curtis's felt like someone actually eating a burger.

Whether that contrast was spontaneous or engineered doesn't much matter from a marketing standpoint. The resulting coverage treated it as genuine, and audiences responded accordingly.

The new Whopper recipe anchored both phases of the campaign: flame-grilled beef, fresh toppings, and a toasted brioche-style bun. Having a real product story gave Curtis something to talk about that wasn't purely abstract. "We changed the burger" is a better hook for executive-led marketing than "we believe in our brand values." Customers could verify the claim themselves.

Why the 7.4% Number Is Significant

Restaurant visit data is a harder metric to fake than sentiment scores or social impressions. A 7.4% year-over-year traffic increase during a period when most QSR chains are fighting for flat traffic is a concrete outcome.

For context: Burger King is part of Restaurant Brands International, a company that has been under investor scrutiny on its U.S. same-store sales trajectory for several consecutive quarters. Any meaningful traffic lift represents real revenue, not just marketing goodwill.

The result also lands at a useful moment for the broader industry. Fast food chains are caught in a difficult position. Raising prices drove traffic away. Value promotions brought people back but compressed margins. The question operators and their CMOs have been wrestling with is how to drive traffic without giving away margin. A marketing campaign that actually moves people into restaurants without requiring a dollar menu relaunch is the answer operators want.

What the Campaign Model Looks Like, Dissected

The Curtis approach breaks down into components that other brands can examine:

Phased rollout over weeks, not a single event. The phone number drop in February built a story. The Oscars spot in March paid it off. At each stage, there was something for media to cover and customers to respond to. A single-day launch would have captured one news cycle. This captured multiple.

Verifiable executive commitment. Curtis responding to 2,000 messages personally created proof points. The campaign could have claimed he read all 30,000 messages without anyone being able to check. The 2,000 responses are an auditable fact. That specificity is what separates marketing that feels authentic from marketing that claims to be authentic.

A product story underneath the personality story. The new Whopper gave every interview, every social post, every customer response something concrete to point at. Executive-as-brand-ambassador campaigns fail when the executive becomes the product. Curtis was the delivery mechanism for a burger story, not the story itself.

Contrast as a creative strategy. Timing the Oscars spot to land after the Kempczinski video controversy was either lucky or calculated. Either way, it worked. The QSR category generates enormous competitive noise and most of it cancels out. Finding a clear point of differentiation, even an implicit one, gives audiences a reason to pay attention.

The Risk Profile of Executive Marketing

The Curtis campaign worked, but the model carries real risk that operators should understand before trying to replicate it.

Executive-led campaigns are difficult to sustain. If Curtis leaves, gets distracted, or has a bad news cycle, the campaign's foundation shifts. Brand mascots don't quit. Brand presidents do. Companies betting heavily on a specific executive's face and phone number are building on a foundation that can be disrupted by personnel changes.

The 30,000 messages also created a customer service situation, not just a marketing moment. Curtis handled it by personally responding to 2,000, but that leaves 28,000 messages that presumably went unanswered or were handled by other staff. What those customers experienced matters for the long-term brand perception, even if the marketing coverage only counted the 2,000 personal responses.

And the Kempczinski contrast, while effective, is an earned advantage that expires. McDonald's will eventually produce a campaign that lands differently, and when it does, Burger King won't have the same opening. The contrast worked once. It cannot be the entire strategy.

What Other Brands Should Take From This

For QSR operators looking at what moved at Burger King, the strategic takeaway is less about copying the phone number stunt and more about the underlying logic: customers are sophisticated enough to detect when marketing is trying to feel human versus when it actually is.

That's a harder problem to solve than it looks. Most large chains have layered approval processes, legal review, brand standards teams, and agency relationships that collectively make it very difficult for anything genuinely unscripted to survive. The Kempczinski video problem is a symptom of that system. The Curtis response demonstrated that you can work around it, but only if executive leadership is personally willing to take on real exposure.

For franchisees, the lesson is different. Corporate-level executive campaigns are not tools available to an operator running 12 locations in the Southeast. But the underlying principle of genuine, verifiable engagement with customers translates down to any scale. The franchisee who personally responds to Google reviews, who is recognizable inside their own restaurants, who creates actual points of contact with their customer base, is running a version of the same play at a different scale.

The 7.4% traffic lift is a marketing outcome. The method that produced it is a customer engagement philosophy. That distinction is worth keeping in mind as other brands decide whether to send their own executives in front of the camera.

For Burger King specifically, the question now is how the campaign sustains beyond the initial buzz. Visit counts are up. Whether the new Whopper recipe and the goodwill built by Curtis's phone campaign translate into repeat visits is the metric that will determine whether this was a marketing win or a marketing moment.

Those are two very different things, and in QSR, only one of them shows up in the earnings call.