Kentucky Fried Chicken in Germany just cooked up the weirdest fast-food techno-marketing stunt. For a week, restaurants lined their serving trays with disposable Bluetooth keyboards instead of paper liners. Grease-free texting is the future of fast food. Maybe.
The idea is that you sync the keyboard to your phone before eating a plate of fried chicken, granting you the ability to type and respond to text messages without greasing up your poor smartphone’s screen. Yay? But think about it for more than half a second and the entire plan goes to shit.
What if your phone times out and the screen turns off? You have to touch it again. What if someone sends you a message in a different app than the one you opened when you started your meal? You’ve got to touch it again. No, no, this nonsense won’t work at all. What were you thinking, you German connoisseurs of mass-produced American South-style poultry? What were you thinking?!
Bad idea or not, the gimmick apparently worked: marketers say geolocated social interaction at is restaurants skyrocketed while the trays were available — and everybody who was served one during the trial period apparently took the greasy, disposable keyboards home. Gross. Profitable, but gross. [Gutwerbung via The Verge]