This is a good time to be Burger King right now.
The fast-food chain headed into 2026 with some momentum and a plan to translate years of corporate investments, operations improvements and franchisee-funded remodels into stronger sales growth.
The brand’s president, Tom Curtis, gave out his work number and invited people to call. It kicked off a new plan to upgrade the quality of its menu, starting with The Whopper. And then Curtis went viral for taking a big bite out of that sandwich, with some positive, if early, results.
Now Burger King is kicking off one of the more ambitious ad campaigns in the chain’s history, one that acknowledges mistakes of the past while boasting about all the improvements it has been making.
The new ads, which kicked off with a 90-second mega-ad that ran on the Oscars telecast on Sunday night, are narrated by Curtis, who seeks to tap into nostalgia for the brand’s better days. “There was a time Burger King used to be king,” he said. He then acknowledges that the brand lost its way. “Somehow, somewhere, fast-food just fell off—us included,” Curtis said.
The company officially “fires” its long-dormant, controversial “King” mascot, which generated attention for the chain and won awards but alienated some of the customers Burger King had long wanted to attract. Instead, the company declares the customer is king. “There’s a new king, and it’s you,” Curtis says.
“We knew we had to at least acknowledge that we know we’ve made some errors in our ways, and that we needed to change those and make a positive impact on everything we do,” Joel Yashinsky, Burger King’s chief marketing officer, said in an interview with Restaurant Business.
“The goal of the ad is to say there’s something going on at Burger King, and I need to see what that is,” he added. “And I think the ad accomplishes that in a way that’s very truthful and honest.”
The campaign begins with the Oscars ads and will continue with marketing throughout March Madness. The goal, Yashinsky said, is to get out in front of as broad and diverse an audience as possible. “We think the brand is for everyone,” he said.
Curtis was brought in to improve operations and was quickly named the brand’s president in 2021 following the failure of the chain’s Ch’King chicken sandwich. Weak sales and profitability led to the bankruptcy filings of several large-scale franchisees, while several others were at risk of a similar fate. Hundreds of stores closed.
Parent company Restaurant Brands International would then invest billions into the chain, including the “Reclaim the Flame” strategy and its acquisition of the 1,000-unit Carrols Restaurant Group, largely designed to speed up remodels.
Franchisees invested, too, agreeing to increase their marketing fund contribution to 4.5% of revenues, tied to profitability metrics. Ninety-seven percent of those operators agreed to extend that contribution, which is helping to fund this campaign. “The increased ad fund percentage from the franchisees is really important, as important as the investment in the Whopper,” Yashinsky said.
Yashinsky was brought in last year to elevate Burger King’s marketing. Almost immediately, he began working with Burger King’s marketing agency, the Kansas City-based BarkleyOKRP, to tell the story of these current efforts.
The company earlier this year began filming Curtis taking actual calls from customers—other executives, Yashinsky included, took some, too—hearing complaints about a variety of issues, like the quality of service or fries. That will help fuel operations efforts that will go along with improvements in the chain’s menu items over the next 18 months to get the brand in a better spot.
The ad campaign highlights these changes in promising a better Burger King. But the ads needed a bit of honesty, too. “We had to be authentic and real, and we had to acknowledge some of our shortcomings,” Yashinsky said. Firing the king is symbolic of that decision.
The campaign also needed an authentic voice, and so Burger King opted to use Curtis. “Tom has been somewhat reluctant to be as much of the face as he’s become, but that again also helps his credibility,” Yashinsky said.
And then came a bit of luck. Chris Kempczinski, CEO of McDonald’s, posted a video on his Instagram trying that chain’s new Big Arch burger. Social media panned the video for a lack of authenticity, and Burger King posted a video of Curtis taking a big bite out of the Whopper.
The video comes across as authentic, down to the mayo Curtis gets on his face before joking that it should have come with a napkin. “What didn’t surprise me is that people realized how authentic and real Tom is as a leader,” Yashinsky said. “In this day and age where sometimes people are skeptical of leaders in big business, Tom is really that authentic and real, and the fact that it came across is super helpful.”
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