For 2026, Burger King had a simple message for its customers: we’re not perfect, we hear your complaints, and we want to do better. As part of a larger integrated campaign, they decided to do something most brands would never attempt — give the public direct access to its president via a phone number anyone could call or text. Open to everyone, 24/7, for a month.

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My role was to take that idea and make it real.

Working with m ss ng p eces and Hexagram, I led the build of a custom backend that allowed guests nationwide to call and text a local Miami number, feeding into a centralized system designed to handle massive, unpredictable volume. Within hours of launch, tens of thousands of messages started coming in. What seemed straightforward quickly became a large-scale communications challenge.

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To manage that volume, we developed an AI-powered triage system that could ingest, categorize, and prioritize messages in real time. Selected messages were then reviewed by human moderators before the integrated agency team — m ss ng p eces, BarkleyOKRP, Mojo Supermarket, and Praytell — identified the most compelling feedback and routed it to Burger King’s president, Tom Curtis, for direct response.​​​​

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But building the system was only half the story. A campaign like this works best when it reaches beyond the people who participate.

For a week at Burger King HQ in Miami, I produced the social component of the campaign. Once standout guests were identified, we scheduled real calls between Tom and those customers, recorded them live, and turned the footage around quickly into social-first edits. The goal was to show, in a direct and unfiltered way, that Burger King was listening and actively working to improve the guest experience.

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The speed of that process mattered. The videos began to circulate, and the internet picked them up. As audiences started comparing Burger King’s response to that of McDonald’s, the campaign evolved into a broader “Burger Wars” moment, with coverage across mainstream outlets like Forbes, People, Newsweek, and Complex, as well as industry trades including Ad Age, Fast Company, and Inc.

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Behind the scenes, the success of the campaign came down to execution. We built a system capable of handling feedback at national scale, then translated that volume into something focused and human. Tens of thousands of messages came in. A few hundred conversations were surfaced. Those conversations became the content that carried the campaign forward and extended its reach to hundreds of millions more.