Burger King’s new ad campaign, which features a series of images and film footage of real mothers enjoying a Whopper post-birth, has proved exceptionally divisive. Arguments against the ads have ranged from the exploitation of childbirth to complaints about the unhealthy nature of the food that is being consumed.

I wrote the original news story for Creative Review on this campaign and I have to say I didn’t see the furore coming. I found the campaign to be drawing on an experience that felt true to life – the ravenous hunger that follows birth being assuaged by a burger. The fact that the food was unhealthy kind of added to the sense that this was a salty-sugary ‘treat’ following a life-changing experience.

That said, I did wonder if the imagery would irk people – while other campaigns such as photographer Sophie Mayanne’s excellent 2019 campaign for Mothercare featured women post-partum, there was something more heroic in the way they were framed. In the Burger King imagery – which is real, not staged, remember – there is a raw hunger that sits apart from some of the neat and perfect imagery of birth and motherhood we are regularly presented with (and which can be very damaging).