Australia & New Zealand Special: Tom Paine

Asked why New Zealand consistently punches above its weight creatively, Tom Paine, associate CD at Y&R Auckland, tells Selena Schleh it’s probably down to resourcefulness, enthusiasm and a touch of frontier spirit. Qualities he happens to have displayed throughout his career and never more so than in his recent ravenous pursuit of a tasty burger blended for world peace

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you can’t have avoided the viral hullabaloo surrounding the McWhopper proposal, Burger King’s invitation to arch-rival McDonald’s to “end [their] long-running beef. With beef” by creating the ultimate hybrid burger in the name of world peace.

Though Maccers didn’t bite, the stunt sizzled on social media, garnered global news coverage (Bloomberg called it “perfect guerrilla marketing”), spawned thousands of DIY attempts and is widely predicted to sweep the boards at international awards shows this year. What you might not know is that the campaign was cooked up in New Zealand – the brainchild of Tom Paine, an associate CD at Y&R Auckland. 

When shots Skypes Paine, he gives us a remote tour of Y&R’s McWhopper ‘War Room’, a bunker-like office where he holed up for three months, windows blacked for privacy, refining and plotting and plastering the walls in documents. “It was all-consuming,” he says with a rueful grin. 

Born and bred in Auckland, Paine’s first exposure to advertising was via his father’s PR company, which shared offices with local agency Generator, whose foyer was “full of beer and Xboxes and beautiful girls hanging around”.

After a stint as a ski instructor in Colorado, he landed his first job at boutique shop Meares Taine in 2004, through an inventive application. “Meares Taine was parking a mobile billboard outside all the big agencies, with the words ‘Meares Taine are looking for a great senior suit,’” he explains. “So I bought a model of the exact same car and made a miniature replica billboard saying ‘Knight [his ex-creative partner] Paine are looking for a great junior job.’” They were hired on the spot.

It was an early indication of the passion and resourcefulness that’s characterised Paine’s career path through some of New Zealand’s top agencies. He spent five years at Meares Taine (during which time it was acquired by Ogilvy) learning “old- school storytelling”, courtesy of Roy Meares and Jeremy Taine and “more contemporary innovative stuff” from then-CDs Jamie Hitchcock and Josh Lancaster.

Stints at Colenso BBDO and DDB New Zealand followed, before he joined Y&R Auckland in 2011 and made waves with projects like Love From Land Rover, a Valentine’s Day stunt inspired by the tale of a beloved Land Rover acquired, restored and returned to its original owners.

But Paine was fomenting another, more ambitious idea inspired by D&AD’s White Pencil brief for Peace One Day, the UN-backed outfit dedicated to promoting International Peace Day. What if two rival burger giants could bury the hatchet for a day and combine their buns and patties for peace? And so McWhopper was born.

Despite having “unwavering allies” in Y&R CEO Josh Moore and head of planning Jono Key, it proved a hard sell, but Paine persisted: registering mcwhopper.com as a domain with his own credit card and drafting countless presentations.

Key to success was persuading Burger King’s senior VP of global marketing Fernando Machado, the marketer behind the Dove Real Beauty Sketches and Burger King Proud Whopper. “Without his support, everything would have been a lot harder,” said Paine. He needn’t have worried. “I fucking love this idea!” Machado responded.

McNothanks: We’re (not) lovin’ it

Over the next 18 months, the campaign was developed with Cold War levels of secrecy: officially, only 10 people at Y&R Auckland knew about it. Paine was pulled off every other project and ensconced in the ‘War Room’ to plan the details of the pop-up McWhopper restaurant, which was to be situated in an Atlanta parking lot, slap-bang between the two brands’ HQs.

Interestingly, despite its reliance on digital and social, the campaign was launched by a press ad. “It was old-school, but refreshing,” says Paine, though it took “around 7,500” attempts to draft the open letter to McDonald’s, which was published in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. Y&R – along with the rest of the world – waited with baited breath for a response. 

Sadly, the answer was a big, fat, flame-grilled no. McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook suggested the companies should aim higher, tersely concluding: “Next time, a simple phone call will do.” Though it could have been a kick in the teeth, the hoity-toity rebuff was publicity gold: “It galvanised everybody for Burger King, although we never set out to cause strife, and it got everyone talking about the campaign.”

More importantly, it got everyone assembling their own McWhoppers, posting the results on social media and generating a huge online buzz. The DIY aspect was always central to the campaign strategy, says Paine – hence the burger-build guide on the website. And though McDonald’s failed to bite, four other burger chains – Denny’s, Krystal, Wayback Burgers and Giraffas – joined the Peace Day pop-up on 21 September 2015, resulting in a five-brand stunt that helped raised global awareness of the cause by 40 per cent.

With Y&R currently working on a brief for Peace One Day 2016, is there another ambitious collaboration in the works? “Originally we thought it would be fantastic if the mash-up concept was extended – with Coke and Pepsi, or Yahoo and Google. A mixed Nike and adidas shoe could be cool. But perhaps it’s one of those ideas where you say: it’s done, it was big, let’s try something else,” Paine says.

Whether international awards juries will tuck into McWhopper with the same gusto as burger fans around the world remains to be seen, but this affable Kiwi is set to taste huge career success.