While many brands have taken a serious, almost earnest approach to advertising during coronavirus, Burger King has tended to go the other way, delivering messages related to the pandemic but with a smile.

Earlier in lockdown, Burger King France offered advice on how to create its Whopper at home and pledged to throw a selection of parties for kids unlucky enough to have a birthday in lockdown. Now the brand’s latest campaign, from Wunderman Thompson Italia, is introducing the Social Distancing Whopper.

The new product, on sale in all Italian Burger King outlets, is everything you’d expect from the burger brand’s signature product, but with a twist: a thick layer of onions that aims to render you so stinky that people will want to keep away from you.

The campaign’s design may lack some of the panache of the Mouldy Burger ads, which got us all talking what feels like several decades ago in February, but Burger King is proving that the advertising idea remains king in these troubled times, and it has plenty of them.