D'oh! dot com

July 31, 2007 2:36 PM

You know how some people have those bumper stickers that say "I stop for (blank)?" The blank being anything from school buses to democrats? I feel like I should have a similar type of sticker to stick on my head. This sticker would advertise:

I stop for Simpsons stuff

What kind of stuff? Mugs? Commercials? Crop circles? Sure! I don't discriminate, no matter what it is. If it's Simpsons, I'm paying attention.

So, as I was fast-forwarding through my DVR list, I came upon my favorite comically jaundiced family in a commercial, and hit the stop button. What was it? A commercial for a movie?

No!

It was a new partnership between Burger King and The Simpsons Movie called

SIMPSONIZE ME!!

I almost lost it right there. What was Simpsonize Me? What sort of new, groundbreaking viral thing had these two geniuses launched? I ran to my computer (something website television commercials NEVER get me to do) and typed in the URL.

Getting to the website, I found my dream come true:

• Upload your picture,
• press a button,
• answer a few questions and
• the Simpsonizer would turn you into a Simpson!

I was in Simpson dork heaven! The yellow gods had smiled down on me, descended to earth, and given me the greatest gift this side of Prometheus' fire and some dude's sliced bread.

Of course this excitement had to die. And die it did. The Simpsonizer is a joke! I uploaded my photo and was told that "Simpsonizing takes time" and like hooey it did - I was waiting there for 582 seconds, wondering what on earth the Simpsonizer was doing.

I walked away for a snack, and came back to find still 300 seconds left. Fast forward to the final payoff - the near 600 seconds were over! It was time to see...

John Waters with gray hair?

To my dismay, the Simpsonizer was a piece of junk. All of those precious seconds had created a Simpson that looked nothing like the photo I uploaded. My Internet user anger inflamed, I immediately took to Google to see if anyone else was as downtrodden as I.

And I found plenty including:

"anyone want to link to a before/after photo? I haven't been able to get it to work?"

"It has coding errors all over the place"

"I'm trying to decide which is more annoying-- the fact that SIMPSONIZE ME NEVER WORKS, or the fact that it makes you sit for several minutes before it tells you that it's not going to work. Haven't they heard of beta testing before unleashing crap like this on the public? ... Simpsonize Me is definitely the WORST .. MARKETING GIMMICK .. EVER."

Ah - so it's not just me. While comforting to find my ire shared by other Simpsons nerds, I'm afraid I must give Burger King one of Stephen Colbert's famed "Wag of the Finger" for releasing an untested, uncapable piece of total trash before it was ready to go.

The problem is that they promised so high, and failed to deliver even the basest of rewarding user experiences. Perhaps that is a lesson to add to the viral textbook - don't write checks your viral can't keep!

Oh, as a final note, when I went to the Simpsonizer to grab a screenshot for this Blog of the ridiculous waiting time, I was instead presented with an even worse prompt: The Simpsonizer is down, because it can't handle it's incoming traffic.

So good for you, BK. You've gotten millions of hits to your site. That would be considered a viral success... except every one of those million visitors is leaving the experience embittered and jaded.

 

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