Carl’s Jr. Is Replacing Bikinis With Burgers In New Ad Campaign

For Carl’s Jr., selling food has long meant selling sex, with ads featuring women in skimpy bikinis and cutoff shorts chowing down on juicy burgers. The chain has decided to go with a more direct approach, and will now focus on using actual burgers to sell burgers. What a novel idea.

In a new tongue-in-cheek commercial, the fictional Carl Hardee Sr. is sick of his son Carl Jr. running the place like a millennial frat boy on eternal spring break and using sex appeal to get customers interested in their food.

Carl the elder promptly gets down to business at company headquarters, literally tearing down his son’s legacy by pulling pictures of busty women holding burgers off the wall — actual real-life advertising the chain used in the past — and replacing them with framed beauty shots of burgers.

He goes on to wax poetic about the ways the company pioneered the “great American burger” while his son insists that his focus has always been “on food not boobs.”

AdWeek reports that Carl Sr. will be the new face of both of his eponymous chains — Carl’s Jr. and sibling Hardee’s — for at least the rest of the year, spouting the tagline: “Pioneers of the great American burger.”

In case you need a refresher course in previous Carl’s ads, see below (though maybe not if you’re at work):

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